More work on the side rails. Lots and lots of clamps on the right side to get everything lined up, then I drilled the rear piece of angle to the roll bar channel. The one thing that bugs me is that Van's decided to put a tooling hole in the channel just at the edge of where one of the center holes gets drilled. Once I upsize that hole to the size it needs to be for a bolt, I may have a figure 8 hole. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I may just be able to fill it with JB Weld or something.
The left side canopy rail is still giving me fits, but this time for a different reason. The new part that Van's sent still doesn't fit up against the roll bar channel all that well, but I can work around that. I decided I'll just put some epoxy putty in the space and clamp it for a while until it dries. That'll make a nice, solid spacer to rivet through. The problem I ran into tonight is the fact that the canopy rail doesn't follow the curve of the fuselage very well. I got the aft half in a decent shape, but the front half is giving me fits. I tried fluting it like you would for most metal with a flange, but it's 1/16" thick material and the fluting pliers don't really move enough material to make a difference. After an hour of squeezing until I was blue in the face, I still hadn't really budged the shape. I'm taking a breather to think about it. A metal shrinker would work, but most metal shrinkers won't even go up to 1/16" aluminum either.
