Final Dimpling, Priming, and Initial Empennage Assembly

I was lucky on Monday and Tuesday to get a good amount of time to dedicate to working on the plane. I dimpled a large portion of the side skins myself and I then got both of my boys to help me out with the rest of the dimples. Luckily I’ve not seen any cracking in the dimples as I don’t think my skins were laser-cut as the recent notice from Van’s Aircraft told us about the recent cracking issues. I do suspect that my wings might fall in that boat but we’ll see.

Tuesday I talked with a friend and fellow member of my local church about my painting issues and he has a turbine powered compressor that he said was excellent for this kind of work. I decided to give it a try. It definitely made the painting much easier and relieved some of the issues I had where I was seeing indications of moisture, but I still have some technique issues I have to work out. The gun also had issues with leaking on the top which ended up requiring me to tighten it almost to an extreme. It’s almost as if that lid should have had a rubber seal on it but it didn’t.

After priming the parts, I was able to put together the bell crank, the battery trey and the aft bulkhead. I put the 1012 bulkhead together with clecos but I was tired at that point as it was 10PM. I’ll work on getting that assembled tonight and keep moving forward.