I continued with the canopy skin riveting today. I really like the Van's designs, but they really did miss the mark with this canopy. As I've been told many times, by the time I was done riveting everything together, the shape of the frame had changed. Now I have a couple of inches on each side where the skins pooch out from the side of the fuselage. It was always that way to a certain extent, but now is very exaggerated after riveting. Once the skin is riveted down and tight to the frame, it becomes very obvious where the frame itself is at fault. The front corners on each side are pretty bad - the skins won't match up to the fuselage top skin. Knowing what I know now, MAYBE I could have really beat the frame into submission way back before I even drilled any holes, but in the beginning it looked relatively close (at that point you just have to eyeball things). The front outside corners of the frame are just manufactured poorly, and I don't think much could really have been done about it, outside of aggressively taking a grinder to them before riveting the two halves together. It sounds like they've always been a problem, and it's not just my particular part.
So I've come to grips with the fact that my build is normal. I was hoping for the luck of getting the 1/100 canopy frames that are manufactured wrong and are a great fit! It's funny to look at the online forums and see everyone complain about the canopy, but then have one random person out of hundreds say they had no trouble at all and they don't understand what the fuss is about. Either that person is supremely lucky, or maybe more likely, has very low standards.
So now that I've come to grips with the fact that I wasn't one of the lucky ones, I'm just moving on for now. I'm not going to worry about the fit and finish until much later - probably after I've got all of the avionics installed and rivet the top fuselage skin. That will change that shape slightly as well, so it seems silly to go through the trouble of trying to match the two skins when the target may move down the road. One thing is for certain, I will learn all about correcting body work using fiberglass! Some people say fiberglass doesn't stick to aluminum and will delaminate at some point, but a lot of people don't seem to have any trouble with it. I guess I need to research which epoxies will work best on aluminum.
One part of the riveting that gave me fits was the triangle of 20 or 25 rivets on each side. The frame has a lot of complex angles coming together there, and no matter what I tried, there was no perfect bucking bar. Maybe it was just a bad day for me, but I think I smeared over one rivet for every one that looked good. I also have some touch up paint to do someday. I really don't like riveting after painting, but didn't have much of a choice here given how things go together.
I got through the aft rivets of the two side stiffeners as well. All I need to do now is the center one, then pull the frame off again and put the pop rivets in the front tabs of the stiffeners.
