Drilling canopy and Rear window
Since I was happy with the canopy edges, the next obvious step was to drill the attach holes. Another nerve wracking experience for sure. No details here as it is pretty straight forward but the required attention to what you’re doing is very time consuming. I put a 25lb. bag of lead shot up on the top of the canopy to apply consistent downward pressure in addition to taping things down well and clamping. I drilled the side rails from inside with Tanya holding pressure on the outside and inserting clecos.
After the canopy was drilled, I got out the side skirt sheet to see what we had. Hmmm… It needed to be trimmed down a little more than 1/8″. I don’t have a big foot operated sheet metal shear (YET), so I had to get a little creative with trimming a long straight line…
The canopy came off in prep for the first look at the rear window. Before I got to that, I thought I would take a look at how the instrument panel *really* fit with the adjusted canopy frame in place. Yep, it goes behind the frame and is a pretty close fit. But, it does fit. Woohoo!
Time for a project visit and RV Dinner! Jeff Bordelon, Jim Andrews, Zach Sadecki, and David Nelson (see Other builders links) dropped in to check out my progress and talk RV for about an hour or so, then we went to dinner. I had a blast! Jeff coined the term “cleco titty”, we all looked at the weird curve in my rear window, and Jim produced the golden nugget idea (at least for me) of how to mount the FlowScan sensor to some adel clamps on the engine mount. Kudos to Tanya for getting the snow drifts of plexiglass dust cleaned up in the garage before everybody showed up.
Alright, another day later, time to get back to that rear window. It does have a scary curve. Oh well, I’m going to build on, we concluded that a little time in the Texas heat and it will be all good. Mark, rough trim, drill, looks good. Next I’ll take the rear window back off and work on final trimming around the curve and at the center line at the cabin frame.
