08/03/2018 Horizontal Stabilizer – Primed All Skeleton Parts (3 Hours)

Before priming today, I actually spent some time yesterday washing all the parts with water and later with mineral spirit. I put them on the frame to let them dry off.

Then today I move them outside of the garage to apply the primer. Even with the less toxic auto primer, I don’t want to spray them in my garage.

Besides painting the interior of my house, I haven’t participated in any other painting project and I absolutely hates painting. It’s smelly (probably toxic) and it leaves a mess.

My first time experience priming a bunch of airplane parts didn’t go as well as I had imagined. I thought I would just apply primer on one side, wait half an hour and then flip every item around and apply another round of primer to finish priming. Well, with my way too small frame, it’s very hard to reach corners and edges of the flanges because they are often blocked by the parts right next to them. I ended up having to pick up each part and reapply some primer to the previously missed areas. To make things worse, sometimes I was too impatient to wait so when I picked up a piece prematurely I would mess up the primer before it’s completely dried off. So at the end I had probably spent two extra hours just to fix all kinds of small issues on each of the parts. Next time I need to prime I’m going to leave much more space between parts to avoid this problem.