The handle mechanism for the canopy latch is pretty simple, but could use a little tweaking. The long arm with the handle latches with the teeth on the smaller arm. The smaller arm has a guide wire that sticks into a hole in the bulkhead cover. The wire's purpose is to keep a spring in line. The spring pushes the arm back to keep it engaged with the long arm's teeth. Opening the canopy can be done with just one hand - when you grab the ball on the long arm, you can slide your fingers in front of it, which is enough to push the small arm forward and disengage the teeth.
The mechanism is a great, simple design, but the way the spring interfaces with the arm needs some thought. It rides up over the edge of the arm and gets caught on top, making the action sticky. It needs to have a larger, flat surface to butt up against. I think if I make some sort of clevis that attaches to the arm, that would be better than the wire.
The standard design for the actual latch itself that locks the canopy frame down is a tube with hooks on each side. Because I modified the seat back brace, the connection between the two sides has to be changed. I chopped the hooks off of the tube. I'm going to mount each hook independently, then connect them using a teleflex cable.
The front side handle connects to the rear latch using a pushrod. The hooks are normally attached to the bulkhead with a UHMW block. I put the provided one in place and drilled/bolted it.
Here's the latch mechanism and how it connects to the hook. The pushrod arm and the hook are at different angles, so I had to twist and bend the thin steel connecting pieces until they matched the hook angle.
Now is where the design really diverges from the plans. There has to be a way to translate movement of the left hook to the right side. I figured out where (I hope) to drill the hole to connect to the teleflex cable.
I bought a slab of 3/4" UHMW on Amazon and cut blocks for the inside of each hook. I had to hollow out a few spots on the back to make room for the rivets. The action of the hooks is kind of stiff with both blocks in place, but I'm guessing it'll free up the more it moves.
I drilled holes in the two baggage bulkheads and routed the cable through (I'll have to pull it back out to paint, so won't go overboard on attaching everything). The right side attachment to the hook is going to need a little more surgery than the left side just because the cable has to connect much higher up on the right hook. It has to be equidistant above the central pivot point to translate the pull on one side and the subsequent pull on the other side into the same hook motion. If the cable is in the standard spot, the hooks will move opposite of each other. The right side is going to be a little more trouble to drill through the seatback bulkhead because of how much higher the cable sets. It will have to go through the big piece of angle that makes up the top of the bulkhead.
