Jur's RV7 Aircraft Factory
2917 hours and counting
Some decisions in life are bare of any obvious logic

In the passed days I have been fine tuning the rear skirt. I filed some more from the edge on the front and rear to make a smoother beveled transition from side skirt and canopy to front line and on the back to the rear top fuselage skin.

I will sikaflex the rear skirt to the canopy and side skin but decided to add some additional "safety" AD3 rivets through the rear skirt into the back of the side skirt

Drew some  lines and drilled away.

The rear skirt now fully attaches with clecoes.

Repeated the same on the passenger side.

With the rear skirt sikaflexed in place, I could now clean out the holes.

This is more difficult than it sounds. The sikaflex is all rubbery and hard to remove and I had to get a clean hole access again to the pop rivets to connect the canopy to the frame.

With a lot of patience and spending way too much time, I finally could get back to the countersunk holes in the canopy bubble. 

Pulled out the hand rivetting tool and pulled the remaining pop rivets so that now the canopy is fully attached in the rear to the canopy frame.

Finally I mixed up some micro and filled the holes which you can see in the image.

Time for the big day. Permanently fixating the rear skirt to the canopy.

First I did a final matchup to see if all looked well. Did some more sanding and filing but finally got happy with the result. The final epoxy layer to close pinholes will be done before painting so I'm not worrying of getting it absolutly perfect now.

De first stage in sikaflex bonding is preparing the surfaces that will be glued together.
On the canopy itself and on the touching side of the rear skirt, you need to apply 2 products. One is an aktivator that cleans and degreases the surface, the second one is a kind of primer paint to increases the adhesive strength of the sikaflex itself. I made some test pieces some days ago and boy doesn this stuff stick together well... I could not seperate the halves even with brute force.

In the image below, the primer is applied on the touching surface and drying.

 It's colored black so you may want to mask the edges to avoid spilling on the canopy.

This is the inside of the rear skirt.

While it was drying, I cleaned up the epoxy glue on the wingtips (reinforcement strips on the inside were epoxied in some days ago), ran the countersink in the holes again to make them clean and start rivetting the nutplates on the wingtip.

With the primer cured and dry, I applied a zig-zag of sikaflex glue on the primer.

Then positioned the rear skirt on it, clecoed it in place trying to remove as much of excess sikaflex in the cleco holes as possible.

Beveled the edges for a smooth look and finally but some elastic straps over to keep it in a thight match position.

I hope that when I release this it will be the shape it took. (and yes, it finally did so it was a good plan).