Thank you for the nice words Greg, coming from you that is quite a complement. Your F-86 is going to be awesome!

The key was making it as self-aligning as possible. The hooks need come down into the latch holes only enough to engage the inner tube at the bottom of the latch and then the locking mechanism will align it to where it needs to be.

Note that to fix the rearward sliding problem when the latches engage, one could make sure that the hooks line up exactly with the aft edges of the latch holes when the canopy is in the right position, but that would be tricky to setup and if the canopy alignment changed at all, the hooks might miss the holes. Best to have the holes larger and use the tab/slot arrangement to fix the fore/aft alignment problem. Note that the tabs are tapered as well and the slots are wider and extend further foward than necessary so that they are also tolerent of come miss-alignment. You just need to be sure that the aft end of the tab hits the aft end of the slot when the canopy is closed in the proper position. I have operated the canopy dozens of times and as of yet, it has never failed to lock properly. Never the less, my instructions to the owner will be to always lower and lock the canopy before taxing out to be sure it locks properly. If it doesn't it could be a disaster - possibly resulting in the loss of the jet. You can of course raise the canopy on the runway before taxi-back for scale effect...

I talked to Bob Neal, and on his F-15, he didn't need to have the tab I talked about to keep the canopy from sliding aft. It seems that in that installation, the hinges are sufficient to prevent that occurance. In the F-100, as you know, the canopy hinge is supported on a "tower" built on a lite-ply plate. This arrangement effectivey results in the hinge point being quite easy to move around as the ply plate tends to flex. This also caused me some heart burn in getting the up/down cylinder placed so it would work. It eventually had to be setup so it was completely vertical in the closed position. With it at an angle (forward) when closed, it would push the canopy foward when trying to open just enough to cause it to bind on the foward windscreen and either not open at all, or really "pop" open when the pressure in the cylinder reached about 80 PSI...

Bob