Painting updates and other items

Been a while since we've had a blog update, so here is the current status:

Fuselage painting:  We sprayed the 2nd and final coat of orange on the lower fuselage, then buffed out a few dust particles that always seem to find their way into the paint.  We wanted to remove all the masking on the fuselage, but decided to leave it on because we can't easily move the fuselage out of the paint room until we can put it back on the landing gear...which still needs to be painted.  So instead, we actually added some more masking to encapsulate the fuselage and moved it all the way to one side of the paint booth.  This will give us room to paint the landing gear in the booth while protecting the fuselage from any overspray.

Also, in the middle of September, we took a trip to Sebring, FL to attend 3 days of classes on Rotax engines.  We attended a 2 day class on engine maintenance and 1 day class on Rotax 912is installation.  The classes were excellent and we both learned some very useful tips from Rotax experts.

With the fuselage safely moved to one side of the booth, we prepped the Grove landing gear by removing some surface corrosion, cleaning it thoroughly, and hanging it up in the paint booth.  We also prepped the landing gear attach brackets.

Since we are priming aluminum, we changed to a different primer designed for use on metal.  We are using Superflite SF80 primer with SF820 catalyst.  We attempted to spray the primer, but ran into problems right away as spots started appearing on the parts, which could have indicated some sort of contamination either in the primer or on the aluminum.  We IMMEDIATELY stopped spraying (a lesson well learned from our issues fuselage painting).  We then immediately cleaned all the sprayed paint off of the landing gear with acetone.  This went quickly and only took a few minutes.  

So now we needed to figure out what went wrong.   Next go around, we are going to clean the aluminum with a product called "alumiprep" which should do a better job of cleaning in case there was still some contamination on the aluminum.  But it now looks like the problem was more likely caused by the primer/catalyst.  The product we had was purchased a little over 3 years ago, and we thought it would be OK, but we found that after mixing primer with catalyst (in the right proportions), it would never cure, even after sitting out for over 24 hours.  Not sure if the problem was with the primer or the catalyst, so we are ordering a fresh set of both and will try again once we get the new batch which should arrive in about a week.  Hours: 10

Landing gear prepped and hung for paint