Fabricated and positioned the roller tracks, assembled the rollers, drilled aft canopy slide and took a bunch of measurements.

Almost everyone talks about how much bending and tweaking the canopy frame requires to get it to fit right. I know that some of it has to do with localized warping and twisting from the welding process, but I honestly think that some fo it has to do with manufacturing variation of the fuselage as well. Throughout the fuselage build, I've done my utmost to make sure everything is laid out and assembled as precisely as possible, with the hope that it will help with the canopy fitting.

Temporarily installed the roll bar and was gratified to see that it's pretty close to vertical. One of the feet isn't perfectly flat compared to the other one, so there will need to be a little bit of shimming to get it to lay on the deck nicely, but it's pretty close.

Based on that, I went ahead and did a trial fit and rough trim on the windshield brace. I put it in place and eyeballed it, then ended up taking about 1 1/2" or so off of it with a hacksaw. Guys have run into issues with this ending up too short after windshield shimming, but I think I've got plenty of margin to play with, given how plumb the roll bar already appears to be.

Drilled the aft slider to the frame. The print isn't super clear here, but basically it's supposed to be positioned as you can see in one of the pictures below when it's match drilled. That chaos of clamps, rulers, and popsicle sticks is what was required to make sure it didn't creep out of position while I was match drilling it.

After that, I made the slider track per print which took quite a while. There is some hand forming required, then drilled for rivets, double countersunk, deburred, and primed as appropriate. Once the primer dried, I went ahead and riveted this together per print.

In measuring the location of the slider tracks, I determined that the inside vertical faces of the tracks are 41" apart. I'm going have to refer back to the instructions, but I believe this is in the ballpark that Vans calls out and it almost exactly matches the rollers in the canopy frame at this point...Sweet!

I did notice during all the measuring that the fwd posts that the rollers plug into are not the same length. One of them is 1/4" longer than the other, so hopefully the frame is riding high, because some trimming is going to need to take place to even them up.