December 18, 2018

Priming elevator stiffeners and skins

Another good day for priming yields another batch of primed parts. This time it's the elevator stiffeners and skins, which I deburred and primed in preparation to get them riveted together.

The days are getting much colder and I'm sick of hauling everything to the backyard every time I want to prime parts, so I decided to prime inside the garage. A few tarps laid down and some strategically placed fans in the cracked garage door set on high made for a passable makeshift paint booth. This means I finally had to buy a proper ventilator rather than skimping by with a cheap dust mask. 

*Insert Bane quote here*
I'm glad the only little stiffeners left in this plane are the ailerons', because getting these scuffed and primed is such a chore. The parts are small, but there are so many that it feels like hours of preparation go by without much progress.


The primer caused my sharpie labels to run, some to the point that they were no longer legible. I was able to use the relative lengths of each stiffener to organize them into the correct order and re-label them so I wouldn't be riveting stiffeners in the wrong places later on.