By the time I got out to the garage tonight it was really too late to jump into proseal and riveting. There's always something to do for another step though. The Z brackets that hold the tank to the wing spar need to be primed. I will have to prime a few of the outside surfaces of the tank once it's built, but getting the brackets covered on all sides would be pretty tough at that point. The bottom portion of the bracket that connects to the tank needs to get proseal around the blind rivets, so I didn't prime that part of it (don't want the primer to interfere with the ability of the proseal to stick). I can prime that part later, so I taped off that portion.
I normally would have pulled out the rattle can primer for these parts, but I've developed quite a hatred for that stuff. The brand I got smells incredibly bad, and it takes a couple of days for the smell to disappear, even if I spray it outside and just bring the part into the garage after it's dried. I will eventually try another brand, but in the meantime I figured I'd take advantage of the best characteristic of the waterborne primer I bought from Stewart - the fact that it doesn't have a pot life, so leftovers can simply be stored and reused later. I don't want to pull out my big spray gun every time I need to spray a few parts though. The cleanup is easy, but still a pain. So I bought a super cheap airbrush kit from Harbor Freight to take place of the rattle can. The primer can be kept in the little glass jar after use, and cleanup is as easy as spraying a bit of acetone through the tip. This is super low tech stuff - the air passes over a tiny tube and the vacuum created pulls out and atomizes the paint.
The airbrush isn't perfect of course, but it worked every bit as well as the rattle can would have, and I have the comfort of knowing how good the Stewart primer is once it hardens. I was impatient, so I threw the parts on top of the propane heater to dry them in a matter of seconds. Then I riveted on the nutplates that will attach to the wing spar. All of the brackets get nuplates except for the inboard most one. For that location, the nuplates are on the wing spar itself.
