The sun came out this afternoon and the temperature started to creep up, so I took advantage and got the wing ribs primed. I had to blast the propane heater in the garage for about 30 minutes, but it worked well enough to bring the garage temperature up to about 65 degrees. I'm starting to learn how to get the spray gun dialed in pretty well, so little by little I'm gaining confidence that I'll be able to actually paint the plane when it comes time. With the temperature warm enough (maybe still slightly cool), I was able to move through parts with almost no downtime, so doing all 15 ribs didn't take all that long.
The big downside of spraying primer inside with the garage doors closed is that by the time the session is done, the entire garage has a layer of primer dust on it. HVLP guns are great, but when you're painting small parts and edges, a lot of primer overshoots and goes into the air. I could narrow the fan shape to cut down on the overspray, but that would really slow things down, plus it makes it harder to get a good finish because the overlap is more severe vs tapered. The excess spray dries in the air before it settles on anything, so it doesn't stick, but it sure makes a lot of dust! While I do have the paint booth I could set up, it's a rather permanent thing and I don't really want to lose space to it until I'm ready to paint the plane. The booth will have box fans and filters in it to create negative pressure and keep the spray dust to a minimum. The other thing I've decided based on my priming experience is that I will definitely buy a bunch of LED light strips to hang all over inside the paint booth. The first coat of primer or paint is relatively easy to see, but the subsequent coats of the same color are really difficult to see unless you have gobs of tangential lighting to see the wet edge.
