Priming the Flaps

I recruited some help for priming my flaps 🙂  Tammy took Acacia to my parents to babysit, and she wound up helping me scuff, clean and prime both flaps.  This step takes a lot of work, and once you start, you have to complete the session.  Once you scuff the aluminum, and clean it, you need to get primer on it within an hour to so to promote good adhesion from the primer. Since I had a helper, I was able to get both flaps done in once session. We started out by scuffing up all the parts with same new scotchbrite pads.  I picked up a box of 20 maroon pads from Amazon for cheap: http://amzn.to/2EeT9Qq

With both of us scuffing the parts, this process went pretty quickly, especially with fresh scotchbrite pads.

Eventually, all the parts were scuffed, and we setup for cleaning them with acetone.  In my usual we used paper towels and plenty of acetone to get metals squeaky clean, using a fresh side of the paper towel each time until it came up clean. The we put some fresh sharpie marks on the parts to keep track of them, and set them up in the paint booth.  While Tammy was scuffing other parts, I mixed up my AKZO primer so that it could sit for the 30 minutes to kick-off and be ready.  I suited up and cleaned the HVLP gun and got the paint booth ventilation going.

Once the AKZO was ready, I started spraying parts as Tammy was getting others ready to go.  It turned out to be a quick assembly line and we got both flaps done tonight. Here’s what they look like after a fresh coat of primer.

After a good 4 hours of work, that finished up priming of all the flap parts. I’ll let them sit for a day or so to give the AKZO time to cure.  I am not really sure if I should count tonights build session as 4 or 8 hours…heh.  While we were only down there for 4 hours, both of us were working, so thats technically, 8 labor-hours of work.  Ah, well. I will just count it as 4 to keep things simple.  Heres the few photos from tonights session.  There wasn’t really much to capture, just scuffing, cleaning and priming:

Google Photos Link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/HgkkXEy8gQ43INUp1

Hours Worked: 4.0