This weekend I moved ahead to get the horizontal stabilizer primed and ready for partial assembly. I say partial because I'm waiting on a spar doubler plate replacement for TAF.

I spent a lot of hours deburring, smoothing, de-scratching, and rounding corners on the H-Stab parts. I think I can streamline the process a bit more based on commonalities in the parts manufacturing process, but the parts do need some TLC before assembly. Add to this the cleaning and priming steps and I'll be looking at a long build process.

The picture above shows the horizontal stabilizer parts after cleaning with Simple Green Extreme Aircraft and rinsing in distilled water. I then cleaned each part using acetone and hung them in the "paint booth" below:

The paint booth is a 60"x63" portable closet with the bottom sealed using plastic sheathing. I found it too difficult to paint parts this way, however. Next time, I'll paint the individual parts on one side of the booth and hang them on the other side to dry between coats. There are too many parts in there at one time and it's too difficult to get the proper angles and coverage.

The picture above shows the completed primed parts that will remain for 24+ hours for full drying. However, after the drying period elapsed, I noted about 90% of the parts didn't received full primer coverage due to the difficulty of working with so many parts at the same time. I will respray the areas that didn't receive full coverage.

This is definitely a learning process and I've appreciated all the details that other builders have published. Hopefully my experience will help someone else at some point.