[RickWoodall]

Working on tip up and scanning the past posts on glass work.
Question?? When glassing down front of tip up canopy vans details how to do it and nothing mentioned about getting epoxy inside front of canopy. Brian Meyettes site as well as a few others talk of blowing epoxy in with tubes/syringes etc to get a bead INSIDE of the glass. Seems wise?
Any of you builders who have done this feel it was worthwhile or not. Seems like it would clean it up and give a nice bead inside and if black or grey added to epoxy would make the glareshield look good but dont see Vans make any mention of it?

Comments?

 

[Brantel]

What I did was take some black urethane windshield adhesive and put a fat bead on the outside after screwing the canopy to the frame. I put this fat bead right in the space created from the plexi to skin transition.

I then took my finger and pressed this bead down into the space. This had the effect of squeezing a perfect round rolled bead of the stuff up inside all the way around.

This does two things... It makes a nice bead inside that is black and it also gives the glass a perfectly even surface to sit on with no pressure points etc.

 

[robertahegy]

When I did my tipup, the first thing I did was to make sure the canopy edge fit perfectly on the glareshield skin. I secured the canopy in place using the mounting screws along the sides. Then I used just enough super fil to form a fillet from the canopy edge to the skin. I used two layers of 9 oz glass tape to fair in the canopy, the first was slightly narrower than the second. Then I pop riveted about every three to five inches through the fiberglass tape to the skin as close as possible to the canopy edge. Use small (3/32) AL countersunk pop rivets and countersink the fiberglass so you can easily bury the rivets. Then the rivets were buried in superfil and a final layer of glass tape was applied, overlapping the first two. Additional fillers and glazes filled in the weave for painting.

I kept the faired area narrow and it was easy to cover the area in the inside with a removable glare shield held in place, to the skin, with velcro.

This area is flexible, even with the canopy stiffener kit. It is my theory that too thick of a fiberglass fair in this area will eventually crack because it can't flex with the frame and canopy. Thinner will flex and last longer. Mine was fine after almost 5 years and as far as I know, it still is.

YMMV,

Roberta