Just to circle back to something I mentioned in my last log entry; After looking at this again, I determined that the reason the canopy is hard to open from outside is a result of two things.

When I fabricated the delrin blocks that the aft canopy frame pins nest into, I took a great deal of care to make that a very precise fit, on the assumption that the holes would wear a bit and loosen up over time. Also, when I'm lifting and tugging at the canopy lifting tab I installed on the aft l/h corner, it's pulling the canopy back and up as intended, but it's also shifting sideways a tiny bit and that motion is binding up the pins in the blocks.

I'm able to open the canopy by alternately pulling the. aft corners up and aft, but who wants to walk back and forth around their airplane 2 or 3 times just to get he canopy open, at least for a few hundred sequences until presumably everything loosens up?

So, after thinking all that through, I went to Lowes this morning and bought a brushed nickel cabinet pull that seemed like would suit the lines of the airplane.

You cant see the canopy frame from outside the canopy due to the sikaflex process, so step one of the installation was to center pilot holes from the inside. I started with #40 and gradually worked up to #21, but in spite of careful measuring and use of drill blocks, they were slightly misaligned and I needed to upside them to #10, which is a pretty sloppy fit for the #8 screw the handle takes. More on this in a bit.

I didn't want any stress on the plexiglass at all, so on the outside I upsized the holed in the plexiglass to .310 with a flat end reamer I had handy. This size is still small enough to be covered entirely by the footprint of the handle ends, but big enough to leave room for a bushing sleeve in there.

I went to my favorite aviation supply house (Ace Hardware), and changed out the cheap cabinet hardware for some stainless screws and washers. The length I needed was about 1 3/8" and the closest Ace had was 1.5". Once I got them home, I carefully shortened them on my bench disc sander a bit at a time until they were the appropriate length.

I fabricated bushings out of a scrap piece of aluminum tube that were long enough so that when the screws are tightened down from inside, the bushings bottom out on the steel frame approximately .020" before the handle feet touch the plexiglass.

I bent a couple of stainless fender washers via my bench vise to make them into saddle washers that conform to the round tube shape of the canopy frame, the better to center the screws in the slightly oversized holes.

Once everything was ready and a trial fit had shown that it all fit properly, I prepped the holes with sika activator and primer via q-tip then inserted the screws, slipped the bushings over the screws and seated them down in the .310 holes in the plexiglass. I then filled in the gap between the o.d. of the bushing and the i.d. of the hole with sikaflex, installed the handle and screwed everything down tight.

The sika primer is only on the inside of the holes, so once this is all dry, one of two things will happen; Chances are high that a bit of sika got inside those tiny bushings during assembly and if it is holding tight enough that I can't get those screws out. I'll call it good enough for government work and move on. However, If I can get the screws out I'll remove the saddle washers and screws, then fill the holes in the tube with epoxy flox and reinstall the screws with smaller washers.

Lots of work for a simple handle. If I had it to do over again, I could have saved myself a lot of work by just laying this out before I installed the canopy on the frame.