Finally! A day that Dad and I both had off and the weather was good! The weather forecast called for 65 degrees today but it ended up being about 72. We knew we were going to be able to get a lot done today, and we did! After the ritual breakfast at the cafe we headed over to the hangar to get to work. 
We started by rolling all of our stuff out of the hangar (work bench for parts and paint, saw horses, air compressor, etc.) We used our normal process of preparing our parts, they were all previously Scotchbrited and we started with the Alumiprep today. Dad scrubs the parts to be primed, and I have the task of rinsing and drying the parts, then we set them all in position on our saw horses on top of a metal grate. There were a few clouds hiding the sun, but they blew in and o
ut. Once the parts were all cleaned we immediately got to mixing our two part epoxy primer. This stuff isn't as nice as the self-etching stuff in the can, but it gets the job done. It took a good couple of hours to get all the parts primed and covered well. We primed the parts for the flaps as well as the aileron skins, a couple of wing ribs, the fuel tank baffles, and some fuel tank brackets. The difficult part is finding 
the spots that you missed. The primer is almost exactly the same color as the milky-white Alumipreped metal so you have to let it dry, then angle it to the sun to find the bare spots. It felt good to get these parts primed though! We've been waiting to do this for a while.While we let the parts dry, we cleaned up our work area and got some stuff put away. We primed the aileron skins so we would be able to get the stiffeners (previously primed) riveted to the
m, and that's exactly the next step we did. We used the backdimpling method the plans call for and continued to work outside since it was such perfect weather. Our method consisted of filling four rows of rivet holes with rivets, taping them and then backriveting. Once the four rows were finished, we'd fill the next four rows and reuse the tape and so on. This way we were efficient and fast. Once the stiffeners were riveted we decided
to call it a day and get heading home. The next step was to finish the bend in the aileron skins and our homemade bending break was at the house (it's already in the truck ready to go for tomorrow though) All in all we had a productive day, and only one rivet had to be drilled!
m, and that's exactly the next step we did. We used the backdimpling method the plans call for and continued to work outside since it was such perfect weather. Our method consisted of filling four rows of rivet holes with rivets, taping them and then backriveting. Once the four rows were finished, we'd fill the next four rows and reuse the tape and so on. This way we were efficient and fast. Once the stiffeners were riveted we decided
to call it a day and get heading home. The next step was to finish the bend in the aileron skins and our homemade bending break was at the house (it's already in the truck ready to go for tomorrow though) All in all we had a productive day, and only one rivet had to be drilled!
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