The other day I put the forward canopy strut attachments on the frame. The rear attachments get screwed to the canopy deck. I measured 100 times, and then 100 more (the rear attachment has to be at the right distance to ensure the struts don't bottom out). Finally I bit the bullet and drilled the holes in the finished and painted canopy deck. Oh, and all of the attachment bracket parts used to be painted. I was really unhappy with how bad the paint turned out though. I didn't have a great way of holding the parts because of their size, so the paint was blotchy and runny. I reversed course and sanded off all of the paint. Bare aluminum will weather the high touch areas better anyway. For some reason the pictures make it look like the aluminum is all pitted and weird. It's not. Looks good to the naked eye.
The plans show that the screws through the attachment plate get washers and nuts. There's no way! The canopy deck is not only tight to get fingers behind, it wraps around and up, so I'm not sure how they expect you to be able to get washers, let alone nuts on. After about 30 minutes of dropping the washer and nut for screw #1, I finally got them on the screw, only to struggle for another 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get a wrench on the nut to hold it. Ridiculous! I switched gears and decided to use nutplates instead. I put the nutplates on a small piece of aluminum so I could put the whole thing up inside the canopy deck and not have to hold it steady once the screws were started. The nutplates have to set way up at the edge of the plate in order to fit inside the canopy deck. Ideally I would have used the single lug nutplates (one attachment arm on one side vs the dual lug version with an arm on each side), but I don' t have any of those in the #8 screw size. I had to cram two normal nutplates together. It's ugly, but worked.
The struts are pretty beefy, and the frame is definitely over sprung without the weight of the canopy. The struts also pulled the canopy forward a bit, closing that skin gap I had worked on over and over. I tried to lift the canopy, but with it being pushed forward more the skin got caught on the front fuselage skin as it raised up. I didn't want to try to take the struts off with them compressed, so instead I took the fuselage skin off so I could lift the canopy without fear of catching the skins on each other. A common fix to the issue of the struts pulling the frame forward is to rivet a big block on the longeron behind the subpanel and then attach an adjustable screw to the front channel of the canopy frame that can rest against the block. That way you can physically set the forward stop of the frame. I'm not sure if that'll be necessary or not. I'll figure it out once I get a little further in the process.
Having taken the fuselage skin off, I figured I may as well take the time to work on a few items on the punch list that were waiting for the skin to be removed. The subpanel has 3 holes on each side that I couldn't get a rivet gun on (3 vertical rivets below). A long time ago I had measured the thickness of the material and bought a few cherry max pop rivets to use in place of solid rivets. These are structural rivets (steel vs aluminum) that you can use anywhere a solid rivet is indicated. They are ridiculously expensive too!
One of the other things that I had completely forgotten about is dealing with two figure eight holes in the subpanel flange. This happened when I was struggling with getting the skin to fit. I ran out of steam today, but I'm going to have to fit a small doubler onto the flange.
