Light Aircraft Association

Hi,

has anyone got any practical experience of making their own canopy moulding that they'd like to share? I have read up what I can from from articles in old magazines and off the internet, but it looks like one of those black-arts with a steep learning curve.

It would be good to find someone (amateur or commercial) in the UK that has done it and could potentially advise or help me with a one-off.

regards,

Colin

A useful source of canopies used to be motorcycles where the moulded windscreens were blown as a bubble and then cut to make two windscreens. G-BBBB the Mono has one and was one of a batch of canopies Pat Barker obtained in the 70's.

Hi Colin,

I'd be interested to hear what you find, and how you get on. I'm building a taylor monoplane and will need to source a canopy too...

Regards,

Michael

There was a cracking article in an old PFA magazine, written by a chap who made a blown canopy for a Corby Starlet. I recall that it had several pictures of the set-up, including information on how he achieved the correct temperature for deformation of material.

mfalcon wrote:Hi Colin,

I'd be interested to hear what you find, and how you get on. I'm building a taylor monoplane and will need to source a canopy too...

Regards,

Michael

Hi, any thing useful that comes up I will post here, I do have some links to various articles which I will add when I get a chance. Bill McCarthy mentioned an LAA magazine article that I haven't seen - perhaps someone will come across that. It will be useful when the PFA/LAA magazines are available as a pdf archive, there must be a lot of useful construction related articles in them.

regards,

Colin