Lindy
4/20/2008
Today is the 6th anniversary of our wedding day! Six years. I love it, but it's going fast!!
She had a training session this morning, so I got a few hours in on the airplane before I had to mow the yard for the first time this year. I actually did quite a bit, but wasn't able to cross the last item off my list for the day.
I started by clecoing the canopy frame skin on the frame to drill the skin to the aft AL tube to #30. Then I worked on dimpling and deburring the skin and frame where necessary. I haven't used my homemade C-Frame since the empennage was built, so I had to take a picture. I sold my DRDT-2 after I new it's use was pretty much over with, and I could handle the remaining two skins with the C-Frame and a hammer.
The plans say to wait until the canopy is fit to the frame to drill and rivet the two little tabs that finish joining the WD-716 to the WD-725. Reading ahead on other builder's sites has shown that there is no real reason to wait as that area can, and probably will be, sanded and shaped later on to allow a smooth transition. So I riveted them together today. Sorry, the pic is a bit blurry...
The canopy frame and skin are ready to be primed and painted at this point.
I took a small break from building to make a tool for flanging the lightening holes in the reinforcement braces. Avery sells a tool for this for about $16, but I remembered that I have their edge roller (one Avery tool that I cannot recommend...ALL others have been great!) and I'm not using it since I have the Cleveland one (MUCH better). The rollers on the tool are the same as those on the hole flanging tool they sell, so I made a handle for them, and I have a new tool! The lightening holes that get flanges are pointed out.
The black anodized metal circle was the old tool, and I used a piece of angle cut in half for the handle of the new tool. A piece of steel for a handle would be better, as the AL flex's and bends a little more than I'd like, but it worked fine.
Here are the flanged lightening holes after treatment.
After that, I painted the inside of the canopy skin that was primed earlier. Kind of a strange angled pic...but you get the gist of what we're looking at here. I masked off the UHMW tape so it did not get painted.
The last thing I got to was priming and painting the reinforcement braces, and I got the canopy frame primed but not painted. I had hoped to paint it, but ran out of time.
Time to hang out with Brit, and have a nice dinner out tonight!
3.75 hours