Laurie couldn’t do the blue paint details as planned due to rainy, humid weather. Doesn’t look much better for the coming week either.

We disassembled the canopies and generated quite a bit of work for ourselves. In particular, the guide rollers for the rear canopy frame are in a sorry state, The bearings on a few of them are completely disintegrated, and heavy wear and corrosion have to be dealt with as well.

I suggested a repair scheme to Pete to replace these rollers, which should result in a more robust and user friendly system.

In a nutshell, the rollers will be steel and will spin on a steel bush with an inverted cone which matches a countersink in the roller, identical to the original design. The bush will be fastened with a high tensile M4 bolt and secured with Loctite 243. Calculations show a safety margin of more than 8 for this design, which has the advantage that the rollers are easily exchanged if necessary.

Other than that, the canopy frames have some rust on them, so they will be repaired and repainted.

The perspex canopies themselves are in surprisingly good nick, there are only a few minor stop-drilling and scratch-polishing jobs to do.

The assembly of the perspex to the frame involves non-consistent sizes of washers to get a relatively stress-free fixture. We have painstakingly recorded the size and position of every washer to replicate the scheme when we put it all together again.

The mudguard repair has also progressed, I’ve just put another layer of 200 gsm twill fibreglass onto the first 3 layers, to beef it up somewhat, especially where the bolt holes go.