We had a gorgeous morning to prime today. I woke up with Anne as she had an early flight out and just headed down to the garage to get everything set up for spraying the primer. As always, one of the most time consuming and dirty tasks of priming is the scuffing and acetone rub of all the parts. These elevator parts were especially challenging as there were 16 pairs of tiny ribs that required every surface to be scuffed with the Scotch Brite pad. This took quite a bit of time and I’m glad I got up early to get it done. Then I rolled out the paper on the ground and got ready to spray. Some pictures and more notes on how we continue to perfect the process are below.
First things first – the mixing part. As I suggested over a month ago, I thought a 60mL syringe would work well for measuring out exact volumes and mixing before spraying. It kind of did. Here are the results. The syringe worked beautifully on the active compound (the green stuff). One syringe was able to be used all morning and it worked great. The activating agent however, once drawn into the syringe, would strip the lubricant off the walls of the syringe essentially making it unusable. So I switched back to the glass Pyrex measuring cup there. The combination of the two has almost eliminated waste and gives me a precise way to measure out and mix the epoxy. As always, I continue to use a safety breathing apparatus.
Here we go! Spraying the individual parts of the elevator this morning. It is difficult to get a good spray on the smaller parts without focusing the sprayer so tight that it coats too thick, so you get a bunch of overspray. It is all together a pretty wasteful process, but it does guarantee a good even coat of primer being applied to the parts so you learn to live with the tradeoff.
They always look so good when they’re laid out to dry. This may be one of my favorite things to do. Getting everything primed feels like you are protecting the airplane for generations as well as getting super close to being able to put it all together in the short term.
As a recap, I’m still incredibly happy with using the Akzo epoxy product for priming. I am also happy that I am priming all of the parts of my plane. I know that it is not required and that some builders chose to skip this step, but I find it to be pretty important for the longevity of the plane. I also know that it adds weight, but I was never in this to build the lightest RV in the sky. I’ll add a few pounds for longevity, protection, and overall enjoyable flying. These are decisions I’ve made some time ago and continue to accept and be perfectly comfortable with today.
Total time today = 4 hours
Total time empennage = 91.5 hours
Total time aircraft = 91.5 hours