Not a lot to show for a solid 8 hours, but a successful day nonetheless. I started by reading and re-reading the build plans. I've also spend untold hours online reviewing build logs of other people who have already accomplished this step. The canopy is crazy expensive and I don't want to get this wrong. I also ate up a lot of time waiting for help to move the canopy. It's so awkward that I didn't want to try to move it by myself.

I started with something simple; cutting the surplus off the ends back to the mold lines. this was actually pretty easy in that I was able to just push my two build tables together and set the canopy upright on them with the end I was working on overhanging the edge by a few inches. good access and very stable.

The cuts went well with the dremel saw max and the cutting disk recommended by Larry Larson in his excellent kit planes article. I spent about an hour after each cut polishing the edges first with a vibra tool with 60 grit, then by hand with some 220 grit on a block. got all the saw marks out, but it took a long time.

Got a friend to help me lift the canopy off the tables and then engineered a hammock between them so that I could lay it upside and have it somewhat stable. I got this idea from the same kit planes article, Thanks Larry!

The hammock is just an oversized making blanket with a couple of sheets rolled up on each end, but you can see in teh picot below that I also ran a couple of ratchet straps around the contraption in case the blanket were to pull loose from the tables, sort of a belt and suspenders approach.

we flipped the canopy upside down and moved it back to the table, then trimmed the edges to the mold lines following the same process I used on the ends.

I didn't get a picture of it, but after much measuring and eyeballing, I drilled the hole for the canopy latch. The instructions are pretty vague here and basically just say to locate the hole by drawing a centerline on the canopy and then positioning the frame for best fit along that line. In my case, that turned out to be with the aft canopy bow about 2" fwd of the aft edge of the aft canopy mold lines. Started this hole with a regular drill bit it a electric drill turned down low and brought it up to full size with a unibit.

Everything had gone well to this point, so it seemed like a good place to quit for the day.