Now it’s time to take everything apart and start to get ready for primer and final assembly. Oh how fun. Honestly it’s amazing how long it takes to put everything together and how quickly you can pull it apart. Anyway, I pull the top skins off and get the rear shoulder harness anchors cleaned up and drilled into the longerons. I do a little bit of cleanup in the garage, then start disassembling all the parts by the aft deck (marking parts as I go). I keep the plans open so I can make sure I write the correct part number on everything. On a few parts, I make some orientation marks to ensure I put it back the way it was initially assembled. Removing the first side skin (and finding a place to store it), I then start the deburring process on the smaller parts. (I end up multi-tasking while i deal with some work issues on my day off). I can’t decide if I really want to keep including deburring and scuffing for primer in all of my videos, but for now I’ll keep them in. More for completeness than anything else. If I remember to record it, I’ll put it in the timelapse
I then flail about trying to raise up the sawhorses on the tailcone. I’m sure there was a better way for me to do this (like asking for help from someone else?) but in the heat of the moment, I figured I could just do it myself. I’ll give you a moment to compose yourself after laughing at me.
Once I get the sawhorses set, I flip the tailcone over and remove the remaining clecos and separate the parts. Then “poof” the first batch of parts are primed and I’m on to assembling the parts around the elevator bell crank. Honestly I was getting tired of scuffing / deburring / priming and wanted to put something together!. But, then it’s back to surface prep again. This time on the bigger pieces (J-channel and side skins).
Another time jump, and I’m countersinking the primed longerons. (yes, I should countersink them BEFORE I prime them, but I got slightly ahead of myself. I did hit them with some primer after the countersinks). Again, if possible I would highly recommend using your drill press with the countersink cage. At least for me I got much better results vs my hand drill. Next I turn the camera and you can see that I have primed part of the bottom of the bottom skin. After some thought, I decided I wanted to prime anyplace where I had sinks that overlapped each other. This does require additional prep and planning, and not sure if this really needed, but I like how it looks and it’s what I want to do. This includes the bottom skin where the side skins overlap, the side skins where the top skins overlap, and the rear tail skin where it overlaps the side skins. I end up painting just shy of the overlap line so you can’t see primer when the parts are installed. YMMV
Then I’m finishing up the countersinking of the longerons when I end up hitting my camera / tripod knocking it over and breaking the mount for the Tripod. 🙁 Crud.
No worries, new cheap parts from Amazon are on the way.