[theastronaut]

At this point the front of the roof panel was too short since the owner originally wanted a smaller opening. I had to fab panels to lenthen the roof before I could add the front brace. I rolled a hemmed edge with a friends bead roller on the front and sides of the panels. I messed up the sides when I rolled them so I had to cut them off and weld new peices on later.










Fully welded and ground down.





I tack welded the rear brace in place to check the placement. Once it was in the right spot, I drilled the roof skin and plug welded the skin to the brace all the way across. The spot welds were ground down and the seam was filled with SEM epoxy seam sealer.




Also had to make reliefs to clear the humps in the filler panels for the down tubes. With the rubber seal in place, the humps wouldn't allow the roof panel to seat all the way down. I cut the brace and filled in the hole with sheetmetal, welded it, and ground it down smooth.









In this pic you can see what we did about the inner roof panel. To keep the overall weight down we removed the center section of the inner roof skin, left about an inch wide flange, and bonded the flange to the outer roof skin with SEM panel bond. This stiffened up the roof considerably and cut the weight almost in half. Once the front and rear braces were tied into the existing inner roof skin, the roof panel was extremely solid with no twisting or flexing.