Canopy Fairing Has Its Hinge
Life has caught up with me again. Here and there, I worked a few moments at a time. Sometimes I was delayed for parts, but most of the time it just happened.
Well, enough whining. Here’s what’s been done.
I disassembled and then reassembled the latch mechanism, after lightening it up a bit. Flight hardware this time, etc.
Shifting back to the fairing, I applied micro to the top inside of the fairing, the places that would be at least awkward to get to, and perhaps impossible, once the canopy is on. Here’s a pic of the aft most two sections with the micro on. I might have been a skosh lavish with the stuff.
After sanding, well, after considerable sanding, I gave it a shower. Feel free to look away if you’re a sensitive person - here it is in the shower, posing. It’s not the least bit shy.
Since it was both simultaneously too warm and not humid enough to spray the Ekopoxy primer that I’m using for the interior, I needed something else to do. What I did was drill and cleco the canopy hinge to the longeron and to the fairing. With it all clecoed together, I could do something so basic and so important it could have been a milestone all by itself: I opened the canopy fairing. And hey, guess what? There’s no way to hold it open yet. Plus it’s about as floppy as a newspaper in a spring breeze. While I know that the canopy itself will stiffen the assembly, what I need to do is build a frame. The basis for it is in place, a stiffener just above the hinge.
Here, the fairing is resting on the roll bar, not a permanent rest for it. You can just barely see the stiffener inside the fairing near the hinge.
There are some considerations for the hinge worth noting.
1. There needs to be a way to remove the canopy and fairing and frame from the fuselage. Somehow, that hinge pin has to be able to be removed. What I plan to do is at the aft end, bend the pin inboard, then down, and finally aft, where it should rest in a tooling hole in the seat bulkhead. That’ll secure it when I don’t want it removed. When I do, I’ll pull it around and slide it out of the hinge aft-ward.
2. The hinge needs to be slightly outboard of the longeron or the fairing/frame will bump into the side of the fuselage. I did not allow for this when I made the fairing, but it’s sure as heck included now. It would have been easier to do it earlier, and the manual even mentions this, too.
3. There needs to be some sort of weather protection at the hinge, lest the cockpit flood. That’s TBD but shouldn’t be too hard.
Not precisely part of the hinge, but there also needs to be something to hold the canopy open, as I hinted above. Ideally, it should be incorporated into the part of the frame that I still need to build at the seat bulkhead. Some people attach it to the roll bar but I failed to provide provisions for that when I built it, and am reluctant to retrofit that now. Have ideas but haven’t settled an an approach yet. But I have ruled out a cord/cable/rope/chain/etc. in favor of something which will provide a positive stop. Right now I’m thinking of either a folding strap latch like some people have used or an air spring. Or something else, and yes, I have something in mind that might work, but probably won’t.
I should probably mention that after consulting with Van’s Support, I’m using LP4 rivets for the hinge to longeron joint roughly per the RV-4 Preview Plans. For the hinge to fairing/frame, I’m using AN426AD3 rivets and am gluing the hinge to the fairing/frame. The rivets here are per Drawing 33.
These photos are hosted elsewhere. Now here they are again in VAF hosting, as an alternate.
Dave