-- "Brian Kraut" <[email protected]> wrote:
If so many of you were not good friends I would keep quiet, but here goes.
------------------
Great story Brian!
I did the same thing from the other side. I use a set of simple pit pins that
I drop into the back of the canopy to lock it down and used to store the pins
sitting in their holes in the canopy frame. My KR was complete, sitting in the
hanger ready for it's final inspection. When I went to the hanger to meet the
inspector and open the plane up for inspection I found that one of the latch
pins had slid partway into place, effectively locking the canopy down with no
way to access the pin to release it. I must have spent 1/2 hour with the plane
tipped over on it's nose bouncing it up and down and banging on the canopy and
canopy frame trying to get that pin to slide out far enough to open the canopy.
Charlie Reeves has a similar story about finishing glassing the canopy into the
frame then finding that the canopy frame was locked from the inside. Seems to
me that he had to cut an access hole in the side of the plane to get in.
As a final embarrassment, while building an Avid Flyer, I covered the whole
airframe and wings, rib stitched, and taped before I discovered that I had used
the wrong dope. Anyone that has used Nitrate and Butyrate dopes can easily
tell the difference, but for the first time novice, I didn't notice until I had
completed all the Nitrate dope work. When I switch to Butyrate, the new can
said Nitrate Dope on the label. I knew I had only bought one can of Nitrate,
so I checked the can I had been working from. Sure enough, all of the fabric
was glued together with the wrong dope. I had to strip the plane back down to
bare bones and start over. As an aside, I learned a lot the first time I
covered it and did a much better job the second time.
-Jeff
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