Cleaned up the shop a little bit, and then finished match drilling the canopy roller tracks.

It's a real hassle to roll the canopy frame back and forth with these clecoed on. You can't install clecoes up from the bottom because the lower flange of the canopy deck is in the way, and with them put in from the top, the rollers hit them. At this point I don't see any reason to not bring these up to full size, and put some screws in temporarily to make it more convenient to play with the canopy frame, so I went ahead and did that.

The aft most fastener requires a spacer between the aft canopy deck and the underlying structure, so I fabricated those as well.

It's difficult to get nuts on the bottom of the screws that hold these in place because of the previously mentioned lower flange of the aft canopy decks. I know that some people have cut notches into the lower flange so they can get a socket in there, and others have abandoned the washers and nuts in favor of a thin aluminum strips with nut plates installed.

I don't want to start cutting up that flange because I believe it adds quite a bit of strength in that area, and the whole nut plate strip idea, while clever, just seemed clunky to me if I could figure out a mechanism to get nuts in there without dropping them all over the place in the process.

I fumbled around with this for probably close to an hour on one screw by fishing a washer into position on my pinky finger tip and holding it in place with a magnet on the screw head, then doing the same with the nut. Much hardware was dropped during this operation and at that rate, it would take me a full day to get them all installed. I thought about accepting defeat and going the nut plate route and even cut a nut plate strips out of some .020 shim stock I had laying around, but ultimately decided that I wasn't going to let this beat me.

Ultimately what worked was to grind down a socket to make it short enough to fit up in there, then tape it to a bent screwdriver and hold the nut and screw in place with a magnet stuck to the screwdriver shank.

I was then able to position the nut & washer by looking down through the hole, stick the screw in, and tighten it enough to get it started without tearing the tape that was holding the socket onto the screwdriver.

Once it was started, I was able to get on the nut with a box end point wrench (remember point wrenches?) and snug it down. Total install time, about 3 minutes per screw.

If I had a welder, I would make this socket contraption permanent and eliminate the need for the point wrench altogether.

Put in 3 screws per side, which is plenty to hold the tracks for now and allow the frame to roll without having clecoes in the way.