Today I took all of the parts remaining in the empennage kit and prepared them for priming tomorrow. This is my second and last priming session for the empennage. Not too bad. Maybe if things work out right the wing kit won't take more than 3 or 4 priming sessions (1 for each wing, 1 or 2 for control surfaces). Here you can see the dipping trough lined with plastic sheet and ready for the alumiprep/water mixture.
Here's all the nice shiny aluminum parts after etching. I guess there's a reason the etchant is also called 'brightener'. :)
And after cleaning out the trough, and putting in a new plastic liner, and alodining all the parts, this was the result. The different alloys and alclad stuff takes on varying amounts of color. The hinges for the trim tab only took on the alodine color where it was worked with the drill or scotchbrite wheel. I don't know if it was really supposed to be primed anyways, so I'll probably just leave it as is now, as the edges are corrosion treated with alodine. The stiffeners didn't take on as much color even though I left them in a little longer (1.5 minutes). They still got some tint, though, so I'm sure they'll be fine for primer. And they were tough, too, as I didn't properly identify the longest part when I built the trough, so these were about 3 inches longer than the trough, so I had to keep dunking one side then the other... The dark parts on the right are probably a little too dark (1 minute in the alodine), whereas the later parts I did (on the left) look much better to me (45 seconds). The alclad stuff seems to get the darkest and does so more quickly than the other parts.
