Joshua's RV-9A Project

Spent the morning priming parts; it felt like it was taking time, but when I came inside for lunch, everything was done, and it was hardly one o’clock.  The priming table worked nicely, the spray gun did fine once I mastered its adjustments, and the wind was cooperative.  I had some trouble with the gun initially, it didn’t want to spray much regardless of what knobs I twiddled.  It had worked fine with some test fluid (water) last night when I was playing in the shop, but didn’t want to spray much paint at all.  I pulled the filter out of the bottom of the cup and it worked fine.  I don’t know if the filter is too fine, or what, but it seems to have been restricting the flow of paint far too much.  Worked fine after that (I did double-filter the paint on the way into the cup). 

Set up the parts, the first coat is a light fog coat.  Dry for five minutes, then recoat with more material, says the label.  I worked my way around the table, then started back at the beginning; plenty of time to dry that way.  I turned the fluid knob out 1/4 turn for the second coat.  The parts aren’t dripping in paint (you imagine that you can still see the aluminum through it a bit), but they seem to have a good even coverage and sheen.  There’s some speckling going on in the coating, I don’t know whether it’s undissolved solids, or dust, or bad atomization, or stuff settling on the coating while it dries.  It’s very small, whatever it is, and doesn’t seem like it would affect anything, so I’m not going to worry about it, and try tweaking the gun some more on the next batch of parts.

Primer is drying–if I get ambitious tonight, I’ll check to see how hard it’s dried and perhaps rivet the spars.  I pulled out the VS parts the other night for fun–not much there compared to the HS, it should practically put itself together…

Also dabbed some primer in the drilled holes of the rear hinge brackets, which are made of steel, and cleaned the stickers off those parts.  Everything’s laid out and ready to rivet once it dries.  I’m going to take some time this afternoon to read through some other builder’s HS pages for tips.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Horiz. Stabilizer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.