4/22/2008
I started out tonight by looking over the canopy frame nice and close to catch any spots I missed. There were a few spots that needed a touch up, so I did that knowing that those areas wouldn't interfere with riveting the skin on.
While waiting for that to dry a little bit, I wanted to take a look at a possible location for a defrost fan to go up under the canopy skin. A VAF member, Mark Burns, has a file that he designed just for this, and he sent it over to me this afternoon. I cut it out, and laid it where I thought it would work...
It's a pretty cool looking vent when it's cut. After thinking about this for a bit, I decided against it for now because I'm pretty sure the little computer fan that would go underneath will interfere with my EXPBUS switchboard. I do need to decide on this before I put the canopy on for good though.
After fiddling with that for a few minutes, the paint was somewhat dry, so I started working on riveting the skin to the frame. I started with the pulled rivets that run in to the top of the AL tube. CS4-4's that sit flush are used here. All went in fine, but I did have to contend with the gap between the skin and the tube at the bend. This is a problem on all tip up frames, and builders use many different kinds of spacers or just a rivet to nowhere to fill the holes. I've even seen one builder use little #3 screws that went thru the tube all the way with a nut on the other side. I found that AN960-6 washers were just about perfect fitting around the CS4-4's.
I had two holes with gaps on each side, one was 3/16", the other was 1/4". Three of the washers were used for the 3/16" gaps, and 4 for the 1/4" gap. I used an extension magnet to get them in the gap, and slid the rivet in the hole to line them up. Worked great!
With those out of the way, I moved on to setting the solid rivets. I did use a couple of MK-319BS pulled rivets just to avoid frustration in a couple of areas.
All came out nice, and I'm ready to install the reinforcement braces next time.
2.5 hours