The first task today is to refabricate one of the rods of the canopy jettison mechanism. Then I reinstall the canopy frame to deal with some interferences. The forward seal support has to be filed a bit.



The fram clears the support. (The blue line is only for reference).



Then I cleco the skin and the braces. Pull everything into position and drill the braces to the skin from inside the fuselage. After drilling, the usual deburring and dimpling takes place.



Six clasps are then installed to have the braces secured.



To finish today's session, I plot the hole pattern on the rear frame splice plate. There is a tooling hole on each half frame that comes in the way of the pattern given on the plans. The big dot is the hole's position and the plan have you drill at the intersection just right, which doesn't leave enough edge distance. So I will drill two holes where the small triangles are and use one more rivet than indicated. There is no problem for the other holes.

Before working on the rear part of the frame, I install the braces on the forward fram. This is only a test fit, no drilling done yet as I have to make sure there is no frame is not twisted. It will be done later.



The first task is to reduce the angle between the flange and the web of th frame to 88°.



This operation, warps the frame parts quite a bit (they were perfectly flat before).



To have them lie flat again, some aggressive fluting has to be done. The position of the flutes has been determined so as not to interfere with the position of the screws that will hold the canopy.

The work on the forward canopy frame goes on. First the hinges get drilled, progressively from 1/4" to 3/8". The the brass bushings are inserted. At first sight, all looks good.



Then I make for the second time the parts for the canopy jettison. I still have the right rod to do again.



After that I put the frame and the skins back on the fuselage. I noticed some problems that will need to be tweaked. The gap between the two skins widened on the left side, but narrowed on the right side which also seems to sit a bit higher. There are also some interferences during the opening of the frame.
The frame is known to be moving a lot during the building as parts are added, so I will wait till I addes the side rails and the rear roll bar.

The weather being sunny, I decided to prime all the parts I had available. But as usually first tings first: deburring, sanding and degreasing. No picture of the green parts, but one if some trial painting for the inside of the cabin.
I tried two different hammered effect paints. One is from Hammerite, but proved quite difficult to spray despite thinning according to the manufacturers instructions. And the effect is not that nice.
The other paint comes from the local hardware store, the effect is nicer, but it's quite difficult to spray the paint vertically, it runs rapidly. And the effect is very dependent on the way the spraying is done, mainly the distance from the can to the object seems an important variable. I'll let everything dry and see again later.



While wainting for the parts to dry, I decided to work on the frame reinforcing parts. No so long ago, these where optionnal parts, now they are included in the kit. The first thing is to bend the circumference of the big holes. This is done with a small slitted piece of hardwood.



Here the three parts with the bends done and the six small tabs that have to be cut and drilled.

With the frame in position, the tabs on the hinge arms are backdrilled; Then all comes off the fuselage for deburring.



All is again clecoed together to final drill the splice plate joining the right and the left side of the frame.