The weather actually cooperated today! While it was still pretty chilly for priming, the sun came and went enough to heat up the parts and make them dry relatively quickly. The wind was a bit of an issue, but for hidden parts that will never see the light of day again, I really don't care if there's a random bug or layer of dust in the primer. The hardest part of the whole process was judging how much primer to lay down. With just natural light, it was extremely difficult to tell what had or hadn't been sprayed.
Before I actually started priming, I had to scuff and clean all of the parts. For the ribs, the most annoying part of the process is getting the parts stickers off! I had an old plastic scraper that worked really well, but it finally gave up and shattered. A razor blade is too aggressive and scratches the aluminum, so I had another excuse to use my 3D printer! For things like this, there's no need to actually design it in CAD. I just found a scraper on thingiverse.com, and an hour later I had a finished product. 3D printing still amazes me.
At the end of the day I had prepped and primed the 8 skins, the two leading edges, the 14 leading edge ribs, stringers, wing walk doublers, and a bunch of other random parts. It was a long day!
