19 Feb 2023 - 1.2 hours

I spent a fair bit of time this weekend futzing around with a paint booth and mesh table. I don't have a way to hang my paint booth walls (taped together excess house wrap) but once I figure that out, I should be good to go to prime a whole bunch of parts!

I also spent some time spraying some water out of my purple $15 Harbor Freight HVLP sprayer to dial in the settings and see how it works. Turns out, that thing is amazing considering how cheap it is. It should be relatively quick and easy to spray primer with it, assuming I can actually get a place to do it.

Moving on to the plane, I peeled the blue plastic off of both rudder skins. This sounds quick and easy but took probably 20 minutes to do. The plastic sticks really well and peels off slowly. If you try to go fast, it just tears off. Also, these skins are really thin, much thinner than the stabilizer skins, so I was also being careful not to pull to hard and bend/kink them, or have them slide into the wall and crumple.


The skins are so thin and flimsy that the instructions say it's best practice to drill through the stiffeners and skins and into the table and then cleco them to the table top. This really helps keep them flat on top of making it easier to manage the drilling process.

I first drilled into the training edge hole. The parts self-align if they are close to the correct position when you drill them. With one cleco in the trailing edge holes, I aligned the leading edge holes and drilled those, again counting on the self-alignment to get them exact.


With the stiffeners pinned down, I drilled every third hole and put in a cleco. After that, I was able to quickly drill the remaining holes between the clecos, which went quicker because I didn't need to make a hole deep enough to capture the cleco, just deep enough to make it though both stiffener and skin.


I took the clecos out in preparation for the deburring the stiffeners and skins, but then called it an afternoon and went to spend time with the family.

I'm hoping to get a more consistent work rhythm going and also knock out a huge batch of priming so that I can make some major progress on all bits I've worked on to date.

I'm still waiting on back-ordered parts (rod-end bearings) which is holding up delivery of the bearing attach brackets as they come in the same hardware baggy. No word on a date yet for those, but my wing kit did change status to 'Assigned to Crating', so I got that going for me, which is nice.