Once again, this post covers the past few days.

First up, a slightly fuzzy pic of the firewall with all the clamps and wedges removed.  Still some fine cleanup work to do, as well as drilling and cutting the slot for the RAM air can’s open/close lever arm.

I then got to work on the winglets to get them prepped for the blue paint swoosh along the leading edge and top of each winglet.  After a final wet sand on each winglet, I then worked the final swoosh design and taped it up.

Both the design and getting all the left and right winglets’ outboard and inboard blue accent swooshes as symmetrical as possible took about 3 hours total.  Note the blue sky with a few clouds in the pic, and no rain forecasted until mid-evening.

Here’s the inboard winglets with the taped up accents.

I had an issue with the gun on my planned second and final coat, apparently the paint gummed up a little in the gun during my wait period between first and second coat.  The second coat shot out dry, and although I put on a good amount, it wasn’t wet at all.  I then had to mix up more paint for a 3rd coat.

My flash time is 30 minutes between coats on the color coats, and this little hitch cost me another 30 minutes before shooting the 3rd and final coat, which after I flushed the gun with lacquer thinner (another slight delay) came out nice and wet.  When I finished shooting the blue paint at a minute before 5 pm, I noticed some darker clouds rolling in, but nothing overly threatening.  I wanted to let the paint cure 20 minutes to get it to “dust dry” before moving one wing into the shop and the other under the carport —both areas prone to dust.

I went into the house to doublecheck the weather on the computer, which said rain was coming at 6pm.  And then went back outside at 5:15pm to get the wings under cover, but it was too late.  The sky had opened up and for over 20 minutes rain poured down.  In hope that the paint may have flashed enough to be ok, I still moved the wings under cover.  But unfortunately it didn’t help.

This is the following day, where as you can see, the rain ruined the paint surface.

Fairly disgusted with faulty weather intel, and apparently bad luck (it only rained for about 30 minutes total… just long enough at the exact time to ruin a good paint job), so I took the next day off from painting (and the ensuing required sanding down all that blue paint) and focused on some other issues… one being a call to EnerSys to discuss both my 12 year old PC680 battery (still acting brand new) and how to recover the PowerSafe SBS J16 battery (much more CCAs) that I bought off Marco a few years back.

EnerSys was very helpful and sent me instructions on how to recover the PowerSafe battery, which I did with the help of the Odyssey PC680.

Tomorrow I’ll get back onto the winglets to sand off the crap paint and reshoot it… WEATHER PERMITTING!