Today is Christmas, but between our family celebration in the morning and dinner with my dad and step-mom in the evening, I managed to put in 4-5 hours working on the rear window. I didn’t think fitting this would take so long, but there were several adjustments that had to be made. I sanded to the line I marked yesterday and then repeated closing the canopy, marking 1/32″ back, and sanding to the line until the canopy could close fully. I still need to open the gap further, but I could start trying the get the two surfaces to align.
Due to the geometry of the roll bar and canopy, the sides of the rear window were pushed out beyond the sides of the canopy. The number 2 here is the number of 32nds of an inch that the window side needs to pull in (from 0.124″ to 0.061″).
Here you can easily see how bad the misalignment is with a straightedge held against the rear window.
I masked the inside surface of the rear window the first 8″ or so up the side and sanded down to the required thickness. This surface will be glued later, so you’ll never see this or likely even notice that the window is thinner here. I’m also not worried about any strength loss since the whole surface will be glued instead of just a couple of screws through this area.
After sanding, you can now see that the sides line up nicely. Tomorrow will be opening up the gap and getting the rest of the surfaces as aligned as possible.
