Spent several hours yesterday and several more today working on the canopy frame. Honestly, I'd like to say that I discovered some secret sauce that make this a piece of cake, but it was just a long slog of small adjustments until it was finally right. At one point, I had this thing wobbling like an Applbees table without enough coasters under the short leg, but I finally got a fit I'm happy with, and it rolls with light finger pressure.

When i did the first trial fit of the frame the other day, the front bow match the roll bar surprisingly well, but the tube the overhead main latch rides in wasn't aligned with the post on the roll bar. This is one of several places that the instructions call out as being something to check for, and considering that latch pulls the canopy snug to the roll bar, it seems like if it's out of alignment there's the potential for it to pull the canopy sideways when latched.

I asked the question on VAF and somebody confirmed that could be a problem, so in my initial adjusting on this, I had slowly but surely added and subtracted curves in various places around the front bow to work this area more into where it should be. The result had been good in that respect, but one side effect was that the front bow wasn't as symmetrical to the roll bar as one would have hoped.

So, yesterday I attacked this whole thing again. I screwed some radiuses 2x4 blocked into a table top and leaned on the frame in various spots to add curve. I also made some short radiuses blocks that could be used with a C clamp to remove curve.

I ended up using both these methods to get the front and back bows in the ballpark, then used a couple of ratchet straps to pull both bows together to get them to the correct dimension with respect to the side skins. This wasn't a one and done process, but took several hours with lots of pondering where to bend, off measuring and trial fitting to see how much was enough, etc.

Finally I was able to get it level at all 4 corners, symmetrical to the roll bar, and with all the various points at about the right dimension to the fuselage skins (inset 1/16"). I say "about" because while the front and rear corners of the frame are inset the correct amount, the midpoint on each side is in more like 1/8". I believe that this is something that I can deal with during fitting of the canopy skirts, and everything else fits so well that I'm not going to try to tweak them outboard more. Especially since they are square tube and I have a sneaking suspicion they would be quite a bit harder to bend without kinking than the round tube that comprises the rest of the frame.

I've included a couple of "before" pictures that show the front bow misaligned with the roll bar. The way the fuselage is oriented in the garage right now I had to take those pictures from out in the driveway. There's no "after picture" because by the time I got this wrapped up it was dumping rain outside and I didn't want to open up the garage door. You'll just have to take it on faith for now that it fits a lot better :)

I trial fit the frame to the plane, everything looked good so I went ahead and drilled a coupe of holes in the tracks to hold them in place with clecoes.

Once I had an idea of the height of the bent portion of the track at the turtle deck, It seemed that the rv8 track parts I ordered with the finish kit would work without a ton of modification, so I went ahead and assembled the longer track and taped it to the fuselage.

Based on an internet search, the super tracks mod ends up with a track extension that adds about 10" to the aft end of the RV7 track, so I cut the RV8 parts to add 11" of track. At some future point, I'll add the rest of the super tracks kit and then trim it to final length once I determine what that actually needs to be.

I finished off the day by making sure that the frame will slide through it's full range of travel without binding up or hitting the fuselage somewhere.

I spent so long on this that I ended up playing with it for about 1/2 hour, simply because I could hardly believe that it actually worked.

I still haven't gotten a disposition back from Vans re the longeron I nicked last week, and there's an outside chance this I might end up with a doubler or something that would effect the roll bar height, so I'm about as far along on this section as I can go prior to getting that resolved. I emailed Sterling last Friday and he told me that Engineering reviews stuff like this as time allows and that it might take a week or two. I'm hoping that it's on the shorter end of that estimate, because I'd really like to get this whole thing wrapped up rather than have to come back to it later.