This is not exciting news but it may be of interest to a few people. I was looking at a photo of a DF seat mount built by Garrie Hill, when I thought that I saw a bag fitted to the back side of the DF seat. It turned out that it was not a bag. But I liked the idea of using that space for a lightweight bag.

This is the bag that I came up with. The material is a nylon mesh fabric that I bought on eBay. I don’t have a proper sewing machine so it’s put together with contact cement and held in place with velcro. It’s about 9 inches wide at the top, 12 inches wide at the bottom and 14″ from top to bottom.

When I sold my red DFXL, I included my shade cap in the sale. It was a copy that I made of the factory part sold by ICB. It worked OK, but I never really liked the way it mounted with the 2 straight struts holding up the front (shown below).

With spring around the corner, I need to replace that shade cap. But I want something that looks a little better than my previous shade cap. So I came up with a hood, popped out of my aero hood mold, that has a little more structure. It maintains the sections that interface with the cockpit so no straight struts are needed. I opened up the visor area and side windows quite a bit to promote airflow. The sides and visor area openings are contiguous so the cap area looks like it’s floating without any structure holding it up. It did require some interior bracing to stabilize the cap area. (By the way… I’m not sure I like the white cap paint job…)

I haven’t tried the cap out in warm weather yet. I think that there’s enough open area to allow air in, but may need some exit vents to allow that air to flow through the cockpit.

Update: After a short test, I noticed that as the speed increases, less air enters the cockpit through the front NACA duct. This may be due to chaotic air flow inside the cockpit. With that in mind, I’ve added a new air exit duct to see if that can improve the air flow out of the cockpit.

More testing to come…