Prime time

On a right down wind for runway 14 at South Lakeland, arriving to chip at away at this resto...

When I got to the plane and started looking over what had been done so far I noticed this helpful little note of instruction penned on my new turtle deck. It says "Take the Whitney Punch and punch out slugs .030 thick, then to use the Mushroom set to drive the slug into my miss-drilled holes; like a rivet.

So the next time the skin came off we did just that and it worked perfectly. Next time Ill still be more carefull drilling. These holes resulted from my back drilling the hold to diverge from the line.

I forgot to mention that last weekend we did get a few things. I have been cleaning out the interior as we have gone along and had it to a point that I was ready to put some paint down on it. Im sure there were better methods but I cleaned all the adhesive off the inside wiped it down, prepped it , masked it and sprayed it with about 3 rattle cans of "Appliance Paint" in Almond color. After having let it cure up during the week I found that it had set up nice and hard. It passed the fingernail test, so Im pleased and Ill be able to touch it up anywhere there is a wolly-world.

As I mentioned before I'm going to relocate the radios to the right hand side if I can work out the clearances.

This is a little rendering I taped up to signal to Jay that painting the damn thing Yellow what not on my mind. I really would like to paint it flat black but have been talked out of that due to the way it will show fluid stains, forever. So then I still think a semi-gloss black or even full gloss would be good. I understand that with black fuel tanks I may need to not fill them up all the way. Or maybe no more then half if it will be on the ramp for any amount of time, but I'd like to keep it hangered of course. I do not think that it would be any hotter than any other color other than white. As a second choice I like the scheme below. I am partial to the Rockets that are sporting camo schemes, but dont care for the p-51 look; I like the actual camo schemes. Still thinking about it all. Jay said earlier that he wanted a line of demarcation so that we could paint the bottom and then the top and if I picked a solid color I would have a line... Not  sure ho other people have done it then... He is also pretty intent on the fact that I would have to buy him a gun for each and every color I may want other than yellow and white. Im not sure at this point if he is serious or still just antagonizing me about the colors.

I pulled the clecos out of one side and across the top so that I could drill and add some more rivets to the old/new bulkhead joint.

While it was still opened up on one side and since we already had the underside primed we started pounding the rivets that were accessible.

I did the grunt work and Jay and I worked out our communication and got our method down before closing it up and having me crawl inside the tunnel of boom.

I really think I got the short end when it came time to pick jobs.

The first row looks great so its on tho the rest of them now.

Although it may look like I am giving my fuselage a giant hug, It is just where I grabbed it to wheel it out of the hanger for a coat of primer on the turtle deck.

Before

A little pride in ownership pose...
It is pretty clear in this picture that when the guys on VAF say "loose some weight" or "go on a diet" as the best solution for any number of given issues, it simply inst going to work for me...

After (and out of focus)