A fundamental rule in metal airplane building is to never drill a hole until you have no choice and to never rivet it until you have run out of options. Once you drill and rivet, your paths forward are limited without potentially significant rework. Until you rivet, you can always take things apart and re-fit (or replace) parts. Once the rivets go in, changing things is much more difficult. Hence, deciding to rivet something as complex as the canopy and metal skirt pieces on the Rocket is a “Crossing the Rubicon” moment—like Caesar of old, you really can’t go back.
But until you get to the far side of the river, you can’t go forward either—and I’d reached the point where I’d run out of options, so out came the various rivets—solid and pulled—and the tools to put it all together. The standard skirt on the F1 is built out of numerous aluminum pieces—rather old-school in the modern world of fiberglass parts. Having done glass skirts on both our RV-3 and RV-8, I had attacked the aluminum pieces with a little trepidation several months back … and was pleasantly surprised that the fit seemed to work out fairly well. But still … never rivet until you have to!
It was a full day’s work to get all the rivets in place, the latch mechanisms reinstalled, and the canopy back on the airplane to check the fit—but now that it is done, we can start putting away the metalworking tools and get down to finish-fitting all of the fiberglass tips and fairings. It’s really beginning to look a lot like an airplane!
Before you cut the canopy and start installing it, inspect your workspace to make sure there are no stout ropes, handguns, or other tools you could use to put yourself out of your misery!
In this case, I actually had a “practice” canopy – the 25-year-old kit came with a canopy that had been slightly damaged in storage. I bought a new one, but had all the original fitting with the “bad” one, then transferred my practice knowledge and dimensions to the “good” one. I was prepared to make new skirts if the first ones didn’t work well, but I was pleasantly surprised. But you never know if it all works until you do that last rivet – you can always crack the plastic and have to start over!