Horizontal Stabilizer
Major mistake!!!!! Oh man what a headache I created. If you remember back to when I first got the primer it had settled and the different parts had basically separated in the can and I had to mix and mix and mix and mix to get everything back into solution. Well, as it turns out the same thing happened to the catalyst! I put the stir stick into the can, but it is so small that when I thought it was at the bottom I really was riding on top of the settle out parts on the bottom 1/8'' of the can. So long story short everything I have primed with the 2 part primer will never cure and needs to be redone!!! To recap thats all the work on the Horizontal Stabilizer and the entire Rudder, I guess the forces my hand on rebuilding the rudder in the future. Oh well, what can you do but learn and move forward.
How did I realize this you ask, well I noticed that my primer job wasn't great and wanted to touch it up so i was scuff sanding the a part and used the etching spray to help with any of the metal the came though and all of the sudden this 2 part primer that was suppose to be solvent resistant started to come off!
So after looking into it and coming to the conclusion that the primer mix was bad I grabbed my drill gun and started removing rivets. After my freak out and ALOT of swearing naturally.
These drill stopped came in really handy, its not set in this picture, but I moved the drill bit so that I would only dill through the head of the rivet before the drill stop and I used the punch to pop the head off and punch out the tail. I started to get rather good at it by the end.
Ok everything is apart time to start stripping off the old primer. Simple enough but how do I do the longer spars?
Well I built a well and filled it with stripper to let the part soak and make my life easier.
It worked better than I expected!
Now I had to go back through with a rag and really press into the counter sunk holes to clean the primer out of them.
I also ran a reamer though every rivet hole to get as much primer as I could out of them.
In the end everything is cleaned back to bare metal! I did notice some pitting in the metal around where the rivet heads were and used my die grinder with Scotch-Brite pads to clean the metal up. The primer being waterborne I think really caused the metal to start to corrode fast with out the correct amount of catalyst, it was somewhere in here that I knew the rudder is going to be garbage in 2 years when the plane is done. Now I just have to redo all the work I undid and keep moving forward, after I get back from upgrade training!
Horizontal Stabilizer 8 Hours
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