A mirror maze!

Looks like some wacked out metal scaffold assembly, but its just the reflective Alclad coating bouncing off of both sides of the HS skin after all priming was completed. Quite the optical illusion oif you ask me. I've seen some polished airplanes that do this same thing over the entire aircraft.

Primer on, tape and vinyl covering off

After primer is sprayed on, and the tape and protective covering has been removed. Notice the mirror-like appearance. This is the Alclad coating that helps prevent corrosion of the metal. I wasn't trying to make nice even lines, just to get enough coverage where the parts will join together. Still turned out pretty nice though.

Cool looking color scheme?

So I decided to prime the inside of my skins, but only the areas that are in direct contact with the rest of the rib and spar structure. The blue is the vinyl protective covering that comes on all sheet metal parts in the kit. The green stuff is 1/2 inch wide frog tape that is supposed to prevent paint from bleeding and keeps a nice edge on everything. I thought this turned out to be a pretty cool color scheme after I finished masking the skin....

HS Parts primed...

Left and right side HS ribs primed and ready to rivet. You can see the difference between the color of the NAPA 7220 light gray primer and the TE504, which is signifcantly darker. The black stuff underneath is tool drawer liner pads from Harbor Freight. A tip I picked up from Ron Duren. Thanks Ron! They work great as an anti-scuff material.

Light hanging bracket attached to each shelf

Shot of both sides of the light hanging fixture. I just clamp them to both shelves and it stays nice and sturdy. The top pic shows one of the sections of wood that is bolted together. Just a 1/4 inch bolt, a wingnut (of course for airplane drivers!), and 2 washers is all it took.

More Painting/Priming solutions - Make shift portable Hanging Wire and light rack

This is a shot of my solution to "add more light to whatever I am trying to paint." The hanging wire is at the top right of the photo, and I took three 1"x2"x8 foot pieces of wood and bolted them together in kind of a super large folding ruler type of thing, and I can lay these across the garage just aft of the hanging wire, and add some spot light fixtures as shown here. Then I run an extension cord over to the lights and go from there. The 3-piece wood bracket then folds back up and stores up against a wall, completely out of the way, until the next time I need it. This seems to be working out fairly well, but there is still never enough light, as they say.....

Priming HS parts

Now for some pics that show what the primer looks like after it is applied to the part with the paint gun. Once you get the mix correct, and get the gun set up correctly, this is actually kind of fun, but the setup and cleanup routines are a bit time consuming, as I have previously described.

This is a pic of the first attempt I made to primer one of the spars. It is a bit hard to see in this photo, but the primer was not mixed thoroughly enough, and the result was a very opaque or transparent coating, with very little actual primer pigment. My tendency was to overspray this to attempt to get a darker coat. Instead, all I got was a bunch of runs, as shown here.

Here is a pic that shows the difference of the parts in unprimed/bare metal (part on the left), the improperly mixed part (center), and what it should look like when a proper primer coat is applied. As always, click on the photo to show it in full resolution to really see the difference.

Shows parts on the hanging wires (14 gauge ground wire) Two of the nose ribs and one of the spars for the HS are shown.

Shows 2 of the ribs primed and the rest waiting for their turn on the wire. Also shown are the angle support brackets on the left, which were shot with NAPA 7220.