Ralph, Thanks for the confirmation of it being a bad idea to heat the windshield to make it fit better. I thought that this might be the case so I'll drop that idea. It turns out that as the installation of the windshield progressed today and I repositioned the vertical edges of it inside the front door frames it all fit much better, and with less bending of the acrylic to make it fit up close to the mating door frame surfaces. I also accomplished some more trimming of the cutout area near the forward wing attachment pins and this seemed to help reduce the acrylic bending in that area that I was initially concerned about since that area has been known to be crack prone. Although I must have taken the windshield off and on many times while trimming the vertical edges little by little, it all began to fit better and better with each trimming iteration. I finally got it all to fit as it should with the fuselage and with the upper cowl and I successfully match drilled all the attachment holes per the build manual (all without any acrylic cracking). After reading some of the past horror stories about cracks I'm breathing a sigh of relief that my experience went better than some in the past.

One additional question did come up during the installation and that is how much should the left and right outboard edges of the windshield overhang the mating butt ribs. I haven't trimmed either outboard side yet. The build manual indicates these edges should be trimmed flush with the outboard edges of the butt ribs. Unless there is a possibility of an interference with the adjacent wing rib it seems that some overhang might be beneficial to cover over the small gap between the butt ribs and the adjacent edge of the #1 wing ribs. Has anyone left such an overhang and if so, how much was it?