My friend Jim helped a lot today, as made the first attempt to attach the canopy and skirt.
1. Removed the canopy.
2. Masked and sanded the inside of the canopy in the locations where I anticipate adding Sikaflex later
3. Cleaned the lower 2" of the canopy, inside and out.
4. Put the canopy in position on the frame. Clecoed it to the front rollbar.
5. Added the skirt and began to cleco it and the canopy to the frame. This process was not as straightforward as I'd hoped, with one side's holes matching up easily, but the other side's being slightly off. Additionally, the six aft holes didn't line up well, and we could only get three or four clecoes in. As I suspected, there were also one or two holes that seemed more difficult than they should be, We tried different tactics to get things lined up, but there seems to be more work needed, because I do not want to force anything together and risk stressing the canopy.
Observations: 1. The skirt is very stiff, and doesn't have much flex. 2. Having a black-painted canopy frame AND black grommets in the canopy holes makes for a giant black hole when you're trying to insert a cleco. It's very difficult to see if you're lined up. 3. The skirt fits very tightly to the fuselage -- so much so that I think there might be some interference where the bottom of the skirt curves up, aft of the rear seat. 4. The truck bed-liner on the inside of the skirt has a is pretty rough surface, and I think it might abraid the fuselage paint a bit.
I made a list of small things to fix for tomorrow, and knocked off work for the day.