Joshua's RV-9A Project

After building the priming table and cleaning up the shop, I needed to get the longerons out of the way to make space for priming…why not bend them too?  I had to move the vise to the main workbench, but the bending of the longerons went fairly easily using the “Orndorff method.”  The only glitch was that there is some minor scratching of the angles, despite having padded the vise jaws with 2 layers of rubber drawer liner, plus masking tape–so that’ll have to be smoothed out.  Fitted the canopy decks to the longerons at the appropriate place, and drilled them together before setting them out of the way…at least as out-of-the-way as you can get 15′ pieces of angle with odd bends in them.

Before progress can continue, some changes in the shop needed to occur, which ended up taking most of an entire day to effect.

Mounted up a pull-down cord reel Allison got me for Christmas; when I built the shop, I installed an outlet on the ceiling for just this purpose:

Built a simple shelving unit out of the fuselage crate, to get it off the floor and free up floor space to build the tailcone, especially important now that the garden tractor has the snowblower mounted for the winter, and is competing for even more space, and not wishing to throw a car out into the snow and freezing rain:

And finally, built a downdraft priming table of sorts, with a 20″ box fan, a furnace filter, half a sheet of 1/4″ plywood, some 1×3′s, and other scrap bits of wood from around the shop.  The box fan is mounted in the box at the bottom, and draws air down through a furnace filter suspended over it; air which is pulled down through the hardware-cloth table surface on which the parts to be painted are laid.  Plastic sheeting on a simple frame should help to contain overspray as well.  A slot left open just above the filter allows it to be removed and replaced with a fresh one.  This will hopefully make winter priming possible, more easily than last winter’s garage-door-frame-and-plastic-sheeting assembly, which had airflow and heat issues.