• Starting elevator
    Empennage Section 9
    Jun 20, 2017

    The elevator is a surprisingly long section, so I tried to pull out all the components and get them prepped and primed first. What a pain in the butt this is between cleaning, degreasing, scuffing, priming, and all the resulting cleanup of the HVLP gun. It probably took me a half day for one table of parts.

    For my last attempt at priming, I took the advice of only putting on enough paint to just notice a change in coloration (I'm using SW-P60G2). In the end, I think it was much too thin. This time I put it on much heavier, and I think they came out much better. At least it's a noticeable green, as opposed to the barely tinged silver from before. I also reduced slightly less than 200% to about 175%.

    It was inevitable that I missed a part, however, and it had to be a big one like the trim tab spar. Oh well, I guess I'll collect all the tailcone parts soon and try to prime the whole lot next.

    Everything seemed to be going fairly swimmingly until I got to match drilling the closeout tab on the skins near the trim tab. There's about a 1/4" gap from where the shear clip is and where the skin closeout should be. Doh! Not sure how to compensate for this one, so awaiting some feedback from Van's again.