With the roto-tiller done I'm back to the planes. The door glass is supposed to be .060" thick. Someone had installed .125" plexi-glass which seems fine but you have to leave out the seal. Their solution was lots of RTV instead of the electrical tape
I discussed earlier. I'm using the Scotch 2228 Moisture Sealing Tape from Lowes. Before removing the old glass I drew the cut line on the new plexi-glass so it's 3/32" in from the inside of the stamped part of the frame.
A 1-3/4" radius worked well for the corners. The top and rear of the frame are straight and square so there are 2 easy sides. The other edges and the corners I cut with the slow metal cutting bandsaw. It cut much better than the coarser toothed and faster wood bandsaw. The edges were finished to the line with the belt sander and a little file work.
To get the piece to fit through the bandsaw I had to cut a piece from the sheet. I have this nice straight edge with a rubber grip surface, so it won't slide around. I just used a cheap plastic cutting knife from Lowes to score the plastic and break it. It work great for doing the same thing on thin sheet aluminum rather than using snips.
The 2228 tape is one inch wide. By using the straight edge and a sharp knife, with the small breakaway blades, I was able to cut the 4' strip of tape into 2 1/2" wide pieces. Oh yeah, I have a piece of 1/4" thick glass I bought at the local window place to use for cutting such things on it. Don't press to hard and you won't scratch it and the tape doesn't stick. It has a release paper on one side so I cut it with the paper side up. This stuff will stick to it's self at the slightest touch and never come apart again so be careful. The tape was stuck to the edge of the window with the sticky, paper side, to the window and wrapped about 3/16" onto both sides.
The window was fit into the frame and everything clecoed together. The frames were originally assembled with 3/32" flush rivets with the factor head to the outside. The countersink is very small and appears to have been done on the inside as well. If you drill out one of these holes to fit a 1/8" rivet you make the countersink almost disappear. Only the top half of this window still had 3/32" rivets. The rest, on the 2 doors, had been replaced with a variety of 1/8" flat head and universal head A and AD rivets as well as some Pop Rivets. The rivets need to be flush to clear the door frame nicely when opening and closing so I re-drilled the countersinks to fit the 1/8" rivets.
Because the seal needs to be compressed just slightly to get some of the rivets to line up well there were places where a couple clamps with some duct tape on the faces worked great to hold everything tight while squeezing the rivets. This is one of those places where a squeeze is the only way to set the rivets.
Click on this picture to zoom in and you can see the difference in the correct and incorrect rivets.
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