Brief Description: Winscreen Drilling & Metal Bezel Fab - Part 03
Once the windscreen was drilled, I had to mark the holes in the metal bezel. I scrounged around and found the hole-duplicator I'd built originally for the canopy installation last year and found that it worked perfectly in marking the holes on the bezel for drilling. I added some platenuts to the little bulkheads that are riveted to the bottom of the roll bar. I hand bent the bezel to fit around the lower contour of the windscreen-to-fuselage union and I think it came out really nice.
I dimpled the bezel to #8 and then drilled the holes out to #12 to allow the screws to float some to get a better, tighter fit of the bezel to the Plexi. I'm really glad now that I ended up having to drill out from the stock #6 to the #8 screws. They are significantly more solid. The bezel is very sturdy and should hold up much better to ingress/egress activities than the fiberglass would.
The rear canopy slides up and under the new windscreen bezel and fits like a glove. It's really pretty cool how sweet the fit it. During final assembly, I will seal the windscreen bezel with a gooping of RTV to keep the air and water from coming in underneath. In fact, I may use something even more durable like that stuff they use to glue car windshields in. Another thought might be to use Proseal, but that would be pretty permanent and I'm not sure I really want to do that.
Next up is forming a fiberglass front bezel. I want to make one that will be removable so that will present some challenges. I already had one false start on that process and decided to start over again. I ordered 3 qts of fiberglass resin, so I should have plenty of goo to go around...
