I've been working on the canopy for the last five days and it should be finished tomorrow. Much of the distortion of the polycarbonate window has been eliminated with the new windscreen. However not totally. It's much better than it was before guys. The canopy itself has been made more user friendly. If you recall the hinge of the canopy for 2004 was 1" wide with a 1/2" roll pin pivot, which was attached to the frame. Two pressure gas piston shocks were used on either side of the canopy, so as when the latch was released, the piston shocks would telescope and lift the canopy. The engineering design seemed sound, but in actual fact it was a piece of .... We had a lot of trouble with the canopy. A lot of time was spent trying to make it work, but to no avail. The center 1" pivot pin hinge was not adequate to hold the five foot long, relatively heavy, probably about 15 pound canopy in position. It just flopped all over the place and the hinge kept getting looser and looser. One other thing--the gas lifting shocks were mounted to the frame and then to the canopy. This forced the canopy, in the closed position, compressing the lever actuating hinge to where you could not open the canopy due to the decrease in clearance of the latch. One other thing that caused the system to not work well was the fact that all of the fitting was done in my air conditioned garage, and on the salt the fiberglass shell grew in every direction, which didn't help the situation.

For 2005 the hinge has been replaced with two outboard hinges, measuring 13 1/2" apart. They look much like the trunk hinge on a 1939 Buick. Anyway, this pretty much eliminates the athwartship movement of the canopy when raised. The hinge, being affixed to the fiberglass body and then to the canopy in lieu of the frame seems to have helped a bunch. The canopy now returns to the closed position the same every time. The gas lifting shocks were removed to take the pressure off the latch. The same latch is employed this year as last. There are two notched slider bars on either side of the canopy. When the canopy is raised, gravity pulls the slider bars down, which engage on a pin and hold the canopy in position. The whole thing works quite well, and will be a definite improvement over last year.

I think both of you, Don and Hartmut, will like the new canopy operation much better. Easier to get into the liner, as the canopy lifts much higher, giving you more room, and the visibility has been improved a great deal.

P.S.

I had been struggling all day trying to get the slider bars to work like I wanted them to, as I've never taken any geometry classes, this was all done by "well, let's see. This hole here needs to be over there." While all of this was going on the canopy was being held up with my shop broom. Patti walked in to the garage while I was mumbling to myself how to solve the geometry problem. She took in the situation and asked simply, "Why don't you just use the broom?".