Arvid
Posts: 73
Joined: 3/12/2004
From: UtrechtNone, NETHERLANDS
Status: offline
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As you requested.... 
But I have to give thanx to Dion as he gave me the information to make it like this. All credits go to him.
Why a Y cable? If you have enough free channels left, why not put it on a seperate one and configure it on a switch? If you experience problams retracting your wheels during a flight you then can always close the canopy. Just a thought.
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The canopy and its end position as it is planned. The canopy itself is cut with a very sharp knife. Doing it very slowly you
will get two perfectly seperated parts.
On the inside of the canopy connection points will be made which will be fed into gliders/rails. In total there will be 4
gliders, one on each side of the cockpit and one on each side in the fuselage behind the cockpit. Front rails are made from
brass for the looks and support, the rails in the fuselage are made from plastic.
The first picture shows a square tube in which you cut a line. On the second picture you see the rails and with that the
small parts made from small brass tube. They perfectly fit into the square ones. Also cut a line into those as the bent
parts are going to be soldered into here. The bent parts are going to be connected to the canopy later on.
The inside of the canopy is going to get a piece of brass. Two reasons to do so. The first is as the original canopy also is
fitted with metal in the canopy, the second is to provide support. What is difficult is to get the form over on the brass.
As the canopy has differences in hight, with a piece of paper and a pencil you can get the form on paper just in the same
way to copy a coin on paper with pencil.
Cut out this piece and draw the outlines onto the brass.
Then the fuselage
According Top Flite, the cockpit has an upstanding fuselage but the real one doesn't have this, so they had to go. With a
dremel or minidrill cut out enough space to fit in the rail. The front side of the rail is lined up with the hop in the line
on the fuselage.
The rail in the fuselage is made under an angle. To get support from the stringer it is necessary to find it. I used a pin for it. The angle is about the same as the angle the top of the fuselage behind the cockpit.
After outlining the rail on the fuselage I meassured the distance. The left side is a bit higher (distance to the top of the fuselage) then the right side. I made this difference so the canopy is coming loose from the fuselage when moving backwards.
As you can see, I forgot the stringer in the first place and placed the rail too low. With the pin the correct height was obtained.
On the inside I used reinforcement from the piece I cut out to make place for the rail.
After installing
A little dot marks the place to bend.
The canopy tilt backwards when opening. As a result the guiding bulbs need to be rounded up with a dremel
Dry fitting, meassuring and outlining (little scratches on the surface), rough up the surface so the solder can "glue" better. A soldering canon was not hot enough though caused by the big surface. A blowtorch did a good job thoug.
I also wanted some reinforcements at the front side of the canopy and too the front gliders have to be attached to something. So take a piece of paper and lets have a ball. It is necessary to scratch a piece of paper as the front of the sliding canopy has an angle and goes down. If you make a bow and bring this bow in a straight line, the longer side of the bow needs more space and therefor goes up.
The front side sticks out as you can see. This has been done on purpose. Now, when you close the canopy, the front side will slide under the front screen and with that can help to close the canopy nice and neatly.
The gliders at the back side are fixed with solder but this is not possible with the front ones. It is not possible as the front brass pieces were already attachted to the canopy before the right place for the gliders could be obtained. You can imagine what a solder canon or a blowtorch will do with the plastic canopy. For this connection I used two components glue.
The glue the brass on the canopy is also something different. The lower parts of the brass I could get glued with canopy glue, but this was absolutely impossible with the front piece of brass due to the strong forces. For this I too used two components glue. Result is a nice firm glued piece and as canopy glue no visible residue though now it is not loosing up anymore.
The final result.
I didn't make it moveable with a servo, but I think this is not that much complicated though. If you don't use servo operation, you have to make sure the canopy will not slide backwards when flying. The procedure for this I will post probably this weekend.
Hope this will help your building.
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RE: 1/8 scale TopFlite Corsair Mods - 
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