Cleaned up some wayward sika from the canopy frame. spoiler, if you don't d a good enough job masking, that primer is almost impossible to get off, whether the powder coat under it is scuffed up or not. The only way I found to remove it was with scotch bright and elbow grease. I was able to get rid of it where unwanted without wrecking the powder coat, but it took the shine off of it and you can definitely tell :(

It looks okay, but I'm thinking I can wet sand it with some 1000 grit and hopefully give it a more uniform look. That's a project for a different day, I'll likely just live with it for a while and see if it bothers me.

After that, it was time for the rubber to meet the road and see if it fit the fuselage.

I had walked away from the canopy last Tuesday, when we went out of town. This worked out well from the standpoint of giving the sika a week to dry, but I had thought about this thing every day and wondered if it would fit, and what I would do if it didn't. In fact, I had obsessed about it so much that I was more than half convinced that it wouldn't roll in the tracks, or would sit proud at the tailcone skin or something equally horrific.

I was delighted and more than a little surprised to discover that it fit almost perfectly on all counts. Rolls nicely, blends into the tailcone and roll bar nicely; the works!

I had used the outer side skirts to squeeze the plexi sides into the inner skirts while the sika dried, so I decided to push my luck and cleco them back in place to see how well they fit. So far, I've been planning to follow Larry Larson's process to make all the skirts out of fiberglass because I've seen way to many of these pooch out at the aft lower corners on finished airplanes, but darned if these don't seem to fit pretty good!

Every other hole has a pop rivet in it currently holding the inners in place, but I'm tempted to drill out some pop rivets from the inners and try to use the outer skirts per plan.

I'm legit thrilled with how well all this seems to be fitting at this point.