After a two week hiatus (you're welcome honey!) to renovate a bathroom and mudroom, it's back to work. Today finished match drilling all of the lower parts of the rudder skeleton, disassembled, deburred and prepped for priming. Did I mention that the least glamorous part of this so far has been prepping the parts for paint? It's time consuming and labor intensive.
With the rudder skeleton disassembled, one by one parts were cleaned and made ready for scuffing. Unfortunately my tail kit is almost 10 years old and when removing the vinyl, it leaves some of the glue residue behind. This is a well known side effect of leaving the blueing on the parts too long. Vans recommends removing the vinyl as soon as you can and I will certainly do that in the wings and fuse kits. Having to remove the glue from all these parts was another 45-60 minutes of work that otherwise wouldn't be necessary.
After getting the rudder skeleton parts to a point where I could leave them for the day it was time to tackle the inside of the actual rudder skin. I read a tip to wet down the Scotchbrite pad to do the scuffing and that actually worked really, really well to control the aluminum dust. Basically eliminates it all together and made the process go a bit faster I think. The rudder skin took one round of denatured alcohol to remove the glue from the vinyl, one round of acetone to remove the red ink from the Al sheet markings, one round of scuffing with a wet Scotchbrite maroon pad, another few rounds of cleaning with the alcohol and one final cleaning with acetone to get the surface ready for paint. Having done a few parts an hour before as a test, I felt like I had my primer setup about right and gave it a go. Afterwards I was pretty happy with the outcome, it will sit in the paint booth overnight to dry and should be ready to rivet the next time I have a chance to work on it.
I am using SEM rattle can primer, seems to work ok and get the job done for the least amount of prep and disposal. I would probably choose a different color than the light gray that I chose. In hindsight, the color is very difficult to see as it goes on to judge the coverage, it basically is the same color as the aluminum almost. Lesson learned! Unfortunately I bought 5 cans of the primer online at about $20 a can it's just easier to keep it than try to exchange it for a different color. The paint is considered hazmat to ship. So to help see the paint coverage I wear a LED headlamp so I can have plenty of light on the parts as I spray them, seems to do the trick!