PRIMING PREP
Today was the kind of day that I have been looking forward to for a while. I have spent more days away from my plane than with it recently and am glad to begin trying to turn the tide on that. Well, minus vacation next week of course, but hopefully I’ll come back refreshed and ready to put forth another flurry of activity into the final section of my empennage kit. For now, I’ll go ahead with some details on the day.
I started by getting everything ready for priming. I had to go back and match drill all of the holes in the new elevator skin that I ordered from Van’s as well as the new ribs and cover plate (I just ordered these items new rather than spend the time to drill them out of the previous skin and try to reuse them). I don’t have a picture of it yet, but I will put one in later about my new deburring drillbit. I really enjoy this new tool. It deburs both sides of the hole in a single pass without chamfering the opening either. It is a wonderful time saver and I’m happy to have one in my shop.
PRIMING
After that, it was on to the typical scuffing of parts, cleaning with acetone, and getting down to the priming. I don’t have any pictures of the effort today, but I have one here of the finished product. Kind of. I missed the trim tabs in this shot apparently. Guess my building skills aren’t the only ones getting rusty… Bear with me – I’ll get some better photography coming along soon.
EVEN HAD TIME TO DIMPLE!
Now those are some wonderfully primed parts there! I laid them out to dry all afternoon while heading to my daughters’ swim meet and returned home to some dry parts to work with. I was able to get out my DRDT-2 and dimple the entire skin as well as all of the ribs and the cover plate in the picture above. At this point, I couldn’t go inside without riveting SOMETHING – so I put just a few minutes of time into riveting the nut plates onto the cover plate before calling it a night. Overall, it was an excellent day and I’m glad to be back at it. Hopefully, some of these pictures will start looking like airplane parts again soon!
Total time today = 4 hours
Total time empennage = 111 hours
Total time aircraft = 111 hours