I’m afraid there won’t be much exciting to write about and show until I get the empennage parts, hopefully sometime in August if Van’s estimates are good. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on deburring and fluting the ribs for the wings. I think I’ll have those done in the next few weekends. This weekend is mulch spreading weekend though, so probably not a lot of airplane build happening. That being said, I am going to take a drive down to Tacoma Narrows to pick up a DIY paint booth a builder down there is getting rid of. I won’t use it for priming parts, so in reality it’s just going to be dismantled and put out in the shed for the foreseeable future. He’s selling it for far less than the cost of the material though, so it doesn’t make much sense to pass it up. I plan on painting the plane myself, so I’m going to need some sort of booth setup eventually. With a project like this, saving every penny counts!
The booth is a frame of PVC and is about 10x10x20. When it comes time to paint, I’ll enclose it completely with plastic, put a box fan and air filter on each end of the booth, and hang a bunch of bright lights inside.
Side note - I noticed the other day that the swivel mushroom set that I got from Cleaveland Tools had some sort of inclusion in the metal, making the surface rough. Not knowing if that also means there is some unseen weakness in the metal, I emailed them and asked for a replacement. They said they had never seen this happen before, and within two days I had the replacement and a postage paid mailer to return the old one. I’ve been finding that a lot of the aircraft home builder vendors are smaller mom and pop shops and are great to work with like this.
