Time: 6 Hours
Today I set out to treat all the countersinks that I did over the last two days. You can prime these individually, prime the whole flange or leave them completely alone. I decided to try my hand at using Alodine. This is a chemical process that converts the surface of the aluminum and provides corrosion protection. This stuff is pretty toxic if you get it on your skin, I think it’s the stuff that the movie about Erin Brockivich was based on, yikes. So I am using all my protection like gloves, goggles and respirator. In most cases you would need to treat the aluminum with an acid called Alumi-Prep to etch the surface prior to usin Alodine. I’m not doing this for two reasons, 1) since these holes were just cut they have no oxidation to remove and 2) the acid needs to be rinsed away really good and these parts are riveted together already and I would have the possibility to trap some of that acid in between parts which could promote corrosion. So I just used a q-tip to apply a little bit if the Alodine to the holes and wait 2-3 minutes before rinsing with water. Pretty easy process all in all and I really like that they match the yellow of the rest of the spar.
The process took several hours since there are sooooo many holes! After a dinner break I started working on removing all the necessary blue film on the skins so that I can debur, edge finish and dimple them.
To help remove large sheets of this film I used a broom stick (I read about this on another blog) and it worked really slick.
I don’t like writing about days like these as they are long days and not much to show!
