Stjohn's RV-7

5 hours.
Finally got the fuselage latch mechanism done. Managed to get the stupid yellow knob on there without mangling the screw much, and it opens and closes the aft latch arm just like it’s supposed to. The bolts are cotter-pinned, the brackets are riveted, the UHMW tape is applied. OK, maybe it’s not ALL done; the little spring-loaded rod pushing the latch ratchet closed isn’t on there. I still have to blind-rivet the center-section covers on, but I hate closing things I might need to get at later. So here’s that bit:

Latch in closed position. I know, this is filler, but it at least gives you an idea of how the canopy is held down, keeping it from becoming… drafty.

Open position. Silly knob pulls the latch backwards and releases the hooks aft.
So with that done, it was time to move on to the next fun bit: The canopy frame. I’ve only got one photo. This process is fairly uninteresting, and it all looks the same.

This is all about clecoing and unclecoing and re-clecoing. If you’re just joining us, a cleco is a temporary faster that pokes through a hole drilled through two pieces of metal and holds them together. That’s what the chrome bristles are in a lot of these photographs. This process is about incrementally tightening slop. Various arcane voodoo rituals are performed to insure that the skin of the canopy frame fits up to the forward fuse skin, the hinges are in the right position, and the frame is the width of the fuselage, etc. etc. Then you put in the splice plate, drill it to #40. Un-cleco, remove chips and burrs, check fit again, drill to #30. This is NOT easy. All kinds of things are waiting to shift, move, drift, and jump. But at the end of it, if you do it right, you have your canopy frame to the point where you can drill the holes for the hinges. This is where I’m at right now. I think. A couple more hours of this and I’ll be ready to drill the hinges, which is kind of scary. Screw this up and it’s two days down the rabbit hole.