Anyway, it's Saturday and I managed to get out of the Christmas tree delivery service business (for my sister in law...have truck, will deliver) at the last minute, and I swung up to the hangar. Linas dropped by and was poking around my firewall forward setup when he noticed my tie wraps, which are all manually pulled and cut with a little pair of clippers. A second later he emerged from his truck with two tie wrap pullers! Here's one of 'em, which I used to completely redo all of my tie wraps firewall forward. These suckers are AWESOME.
I can't even explain how it works, but the thing pulls the tie wrap to a precise tension, and then cuts the thing flush or better. No sharp edges to cut your hands and wrists on. It's really a thing of beauty. And this isn't just any old electrician's tool, it's actually designed for Mil-Spec tie wraps and tensions. Definitely a nice-to-have doohickey. I'm gonna bum it off Linas again right before I rivet the top skin on for good, and I'll probably redo most of the tie wraps up in my electrical spaghetti zone to alleviate hand and wrist scratching down the line.
On to finishing the canopy. The first thing I wanted to do was resolve the interference with the canopy skin and front deck skin. As I've mentioned before, I got the fit really tight (no gap), and the side-effect was that the canopy couldn't open. Since the frame needs to go forward a tiny bit as it lifts up (due to the arc that the frame swings through), the skins just butt together when you try to open it. Previously, I had filed "complementary bevels" on the skins, as you can kind of see here on the front deck skin (right). The arrow points to the area right in the center where they butt together as the canopy opens. The other issue in this area is that my canopy skin is ever so slightly below the front deck skin, further complicating things. Anyway, I'm at a good breaking point, and Linas needs a hand shooting some rivets...until tomorrow.
