The last days I have done only light duty as it is getting really hot right now and I am not adjusted to the heat yet. Yesterday we reached 100F I believe. It is incredibly dry though, so it is not too hard to survive this.
So, what happened in the last three days? Well after finishing the fuselage kit as far as I could and wanted to go at this time, I cleaned up the work shop a bit, found better storage for some parts that were always in the way and I started pulling parts from the Finish Kit. Separating the parts into Canopy, Tank and Fuselage categories, to know where is what and then putting them away again after being sorted into stacks and keeping the fuselage parts. The ones I was mainly interested are the ones that will require painting, to get this over with while the temperature range is still allowing it.
All the parts I found are the panels that will close up the tunnel and the big corrugated hatch that will close off the tail cone.
I put them in the plane first to get an idea how they will get arranged and to see how they looked. Pretty nice, eh?
Here's another close up of the forward area .
I decided to prep, prime and paint the visible side and to leave the other side alone. If there would really be some condensation and corrosion happening the part could always be thrown out and get replaced. I seriously doubt this will be necessary though.
This is the stack of deburred and de-vinyled parts that I then also prepped. During the week I hope to prime and paint them - if I have enough paint to complete the job. I'll probably order one more quart tomorrow, as the inside of the canopy (behind the fiberglass skirt), the canopy frame and the fuel tank will have to get painted as well and I am sure I don't have enough for all that.
Then, yesterday, I decided to peek into Section 31 which is mainly focused on fitting the wings to the fuselage which I won't do at this time and before the tail cone is attached to the fuselage. But the first page dealt with the assembly of the pin stoppers that will make sure the wings stay in place, once installed. This I was able to do without any other requirements and so I did that. I haven't found a note about this on the forum but I had serious trouble to get the aluminum pins moving freely in their steel housings. I tried to clear off any burrs inside the steel tubes with a drill and I also had to scotchbrite the outside of the pins a lot until they were moving good enough to pass my quality control. Other than that the assembly was fairly simple.
And today I masked the pins and primed them with NAPA 7220. I will paint them along with the other parts to make sure the primer stays intact and avoid corrosion. The steel seems to be completely unprotected and so I'm worried these might start rusting once I leave Arizona with the RV-12.
Oh, and I closed those mystery holes that I had pointed out in my last post. Dave confirmed that he had closed these holes with rivets and re-reading the instructions in section 26 it became pretty clear that I misinterpreted the meaning of their "LP4-3 rivets typ." along with the arrows pointing to different parts but not those mystery holes.
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