Canvas, Round Two

First of all, thank you, all of you, for your patience and for your well wishes.  They are very much appreciated!  The neck surgery was to correct a nerve pinch in my cervical spine that was causing me to lose the use of my right hand.  Recovery is proceeding apace.

OK, enough of that.  In the past few days, we had an appearance (sadly brief) of nice spring weather... weather where the following all coincided:

• It wasn't raining
• It was warm
• It wasn't windy

For this year, it was that last item which has been the rarest.  But all three things did indeed happen, and so I got out the DuraSkrim and patterned the forward roof panel on our bimini.  As I did for the rear panel, I patterned right over the existing canvas.  This allowed me to have everything tensioned and in place, so that the replacement panel should fit well.  I hope.

The pattern, before trimming

And glory of glories, the weather held for the next day, which allowed me to use the pattern to cut out the pieces to make the roof panel.  As you can see from the picture above, there simply is not enough room to do this down below on Eolian, out of the weather, making this an outside job.
 

Our existing dodger has the roof panel and the forward panel (the "windshield") attached, making the combination large and unwieldy.  I will not be continuing that design.  Instead, I will use Common Sense fasteners (male on the roof, female on the forward panel) to fasten the panels to each other.

I expect to start sewing on Friday, but I doubt that I will finish this weekend.  Besides doing the sewing, there is the matter of the installation of all those Common Sense fasteners.

[Finally, a brief note to those of you to whom I cryptically mentioned Wood's metal:  that post is coming, it's just not far enough along yet.]

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Canvas, Round Two