This was a long, hard, frustrating day. I suppose the best way to view it is as a learning experience. There are a lot of parts in the rudder. What you see in the pictures is everything except the trailing edge wedge, skins and hinge brackets. The rudder is obviously lightly stressed because it uses very thin sheet (0.020 in. thick) for a lot of the parts.
I'm getting better at prep now having gone through it once. It still took three hours to clean and prep all these parts. Frankly, I'd rather deburr. It's pure tedium.
Got the booth set up in record time and laid out the parts on my plywood planks. Remember I said the parts were very light? As soon as I hit the smaller ones with the spray it nearly knocked them off the table. Of course, when they stopped moving it was wet side down. Oh Murphy, how I despise you!!
I had to hold down each part and try to spray around my fingers. Needless to say the results were not good. Not only were there marks and splotches from being turned over by the blast, I had the flow set a bit too high and I had some runs too. Just to complete the trifecta of bad, after I got the parts out into better light I had two stiffeners that had almost no primer on the bottom where it contacts the rudder skin. I didn't have any more primer mixed so I just decided to live with it.
Lessons learned: 1. Use a chicken wire table top for spraying parts. The spray blast has nowhere to go but to the side and that's what was blowing my parts around. 2. I need more light inside the booth. Even in daylight there isn't enough inside the booth to really get a good look at the parts while you're spraying. 3. Pay more attention to the paint flow.
Lesson learned today: do not use plywood as a painting table.
