Brief Description: Winscreen Drilling & Metal Bezel Fab - Part 02
Once the paper-doll fairing was made, I laid it out on a nice fresh sheet of .032 and marked the patterns then cut them out with the 3" rotary saw and then filed the edges down ever so carefully right down to the line. You just really can't beat this technique for a PERFECTLY cut piece of metal. Especially if you have a lot of contours. You also don't end of with any edge deformations that is common with a tin snips.
Drilling the windscreen at the 3.5" centers was pretty scary but went pretty well. I also machine countersunk the holes which was even scarier but also went smoothly. I drilled 1/8" and later realized that .125" is too big for a 6-32 tap!! I had to drill them out for 8-32 later so that I could tap them correctly. At one point, I had a fricken 8-32 tap break off in the roll bar and I thought for sure I was totally screwed. Fortunately, after a lot - and I mean at LOT - of cussing, I was finally able to get the tap kicked out of the hole. There was sufficient surface left fortunately to still tap to 8-32 so that was pretty lucky. Did I mention there was a LOT of cussing involved here? Oh, yeah...
Another area I wasn't too sure about initially was the fit of the Plexiglass around the roll bar. To get a flush fit with the rear canopy, I found that a taper was required culminating in nearly 1/2" at the bottom. I saw an RV-8 out at Livermore last week and noticed that they had used round standoffs to account for the difference. Seemed like a good idea and so I used a pipe cutter and cut a series of increasingly sized spacers that worked out exceptionally well.
