Time: 18 Hours
Well the holiday season is finally over and the last 3 weeks have been very busy around here outside of the Hangar. My kids and lovee spent some time here in Chicago seeing the sights and eating great pizza. We also spent New Years Eve in Omaha watching fireworks and celebrating with a great dinner. I’m not much for NYE resolutions but I figured that I would just stay steady with the RV-8 build. So when I got home and tore down all the Christmas lights and tree and got my little townhome back in a clean configuration I got back to work. I’m basically at the stage where all the parts I have been working on for the last couple months start getting riveted together for good. However I’m painting the interior as I go, before the parts get riveted together. That means that all of the parts get scuffed, cleaned, primed and painted. That is a lot of work on a lot of parts. So like anything else with the build I start with one bite at a time! It takes a lot of time I between coats of primer and paint for each piece. When I’m done with the painting I have been bringing the parts indoors to my office closet to hang and cure for a week or more.
I just worked in small batches of parts, placing them some where in the house to cure up when done.
One of my Christmas gifts from the best girlfriend a guy could ask for was a Hangar banner showing off the RV-8 Van’s Air Force.
Rather than make multiple blog entries about this process I figured I would just make one with the time spent added up. The process has been the same, scuff, clean, prime and then paint. It has taken longer than I would like as I have to work in small groups as the Hangar is not that big. My hope is to have all the parts finished by this weekend.
At this point I have all the parts done except the mid and lower aft longerons and the forward side skins. I still need to mount the NACA vent to the left forward side skin before I paint it as well. More to come on this painting stuff!
