I only had a few minutes to work on the plane tonight, but I cleaned up the baffle parts and moved the canopy back to the workbench. I wanted to cut the bulk of the material off of the front of the canopy, but I haven’t seen anyone come up with a good way to ensure the left and right sides are approximately uniformly cut. What I ended up doing was taping a piece of string to the top of the canopy along the centerline near the rear.
With some tape in the center at the bottom of the apex of the curve, I used the string to determine how far that was from the taped point.
I then swept that string along the canopy to define the position of the tape. Here’s approximately the midpoint of one side.
And here’s where the curve intersects the side. Using this technique, it’s easy to get each side within 1/8″ or so which is more than symmetrical enough.
After using narrow tape to follow the curve, I used wide tape to seal up the gaps in the plastic covering. It’s too late to cut this tonight, so I’ll do this cut next time. This will remove the bulk of the flattened flange on the front of the canopy. There will still be a small radius along this cut line that will need to be removed, but I want to sneak up on the proper fit instead of risking cutting too much.
