Trimming canopy latch arm

Another round of thought I'd ask before starting to lay things out. The plans talk about trimming away the excess material from the front of the canopy latch arm, so that 3/8" of material is left to engage into the roll bar latch pin.

Is it common, uncommon but not that big a deal, or what-have-you-done??? if it looks like I need to trim forward the locking notch on the latch arm, in order for it to engage the pin?

Fitting on my canopy, fully forward, it looks like the latch pin is almost 1/4" forward of where the locking notch is in the latch arm. In the second pic, it's almost right up where my 3/8" trim line is.

Cause for concern?

My first advice is not to do any final fitting up until all the parts of the canopy/wind screen are in place. I see the brace to the roll bar isn't in place therefore I'm assuming the wind screen isn't fully installed. Things may move around a very little when finalizing the installation.

After you've gotten to that point start with a conservative trim. See how that works and then make small adjustments until you get a good fit. I don't recall how much material I removed. That being said, 3/8" doesn't sound too far out of the ballpark. The final fit up on mine is very positive. In reality I not sure this is critical in that I don't think the slider will or can be opened in flight, but I do feel better that the latch is a tight fit

Yeah, okay, I guess I'll put this on the ever-growing list of things to do later. The windscreen is not fit, as I don't want to rivet on the top forward skin until I get a good amount of the panel wiring strung. The same with the aft skin, where the slider track is not fully screwed down, because I want to lay in wire, mount some of the remote instruments in the back, etc.

Argh, too many things that are about 3 layers deep dependent on other things.

Agreed - don't worry about it until all your plexi is in place. But yeah, I had to trim mine down just a bit, not a big deal.

So much of the build is spent thinking out the sequence of doing things. I feel your frustration, Scott. The more you think it through, the easier it goes.

I ended up trimming maybe 1/4" off the overall length, so the latch doesn't contact the diagonal brace for the roll hoop. Where it contacts the pin, I opened it up only about 1/16", but of course, every hoop/canopy is a little different.

Also, when you're fitting the external handle, make sure you taper the underside so when it swings around 180 degrees and you close the canopy, it doesn't take out that pristine fiberglass lip that you've been slaving over for three weeks.

Here's a pic. In profile you can see the taper.