My RV-8 Homemade Heat-Curing Box

Interior painting is quite a can of worms if you visit most of the sites for home builders.  A lot of opinions and experience to back up most everyone’s opinion: Should I use rattle can for interior? Should I use 2-part epoxy and gun? Should I just leave it alone?

Whatever the case, no matter what paint you go with, well cured paint will last longer than improperly cured paint.  Curing refers to the paint becoming harder due to the solvents (carriers) working themselves out leaving the parts that won’t evaporate behind.  That takes time but can be accelerated by using heat.

My work professionally in the Amazon rainforest with Mission Aviation Fellowship gave me a lot of day to day A&P experiences most don’t get here in the US.  We learned to make do with what we had at hand as there were no Walmart or Home Depot Aviation Departments.  We did a lot of painting as we touched up the planes, did minor sheet metal repairs and so on.  Add to that we didn’t use 2 part epoxy (ala Imron) unless we could mix up at least one pot and use it all.  Therefore often, we used rattle can paint for these small jobs.  It worked fine in a real world/production environment where safety came first.

But to do that in the rain forest where we got between 20-30 FEET of rain a year, we had to use heat boxes to cure the rattle can paint projects.  We often left them in these boxes over night.

That said, I needed/wanted to heat cure some of my small pieces from time to time to harden the rattle can paint and this was my $6/10 minute device.  The photo at left is of the tailwheel weldment for my RV-8 after spraying with Rustoleum Professional lt. gray primer and gray top-coat.

The point is, you don’t have to get fancy to get results.  Like Mr. Clark said when building one of his “devices” to use on the bad guys in Tom Clancey’s Without Remorse: “Good enough is good enough”.

RV8A to RV8 Conversion – Adding the tailwheel

Installing a tailwheel assembly into a basically finished RV-8A tail was one of the unknowns.

It looked to be fairly simple, but as I tried to wiggle the tailwheel weldment (WD409) into place without removing anything significant  that proved impossible.

Then I tried simply to start the cutout for the tube, hoping it would free up enough room for rear part for the weldment to poke through the skin and allow the piece to settle into position.  No joy there either.

Finally the last resort choice was to drill out the skin, and lift it up, clam-shell style,  enough so that the weldment would pop into place, which it did. (see below)

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Here is a rear view placing and preparing to drill.

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WD-409 painted and the AN4 bolts torqued.  The original primer got fairly scuffed in during the surgery but I’ll buff out and repaint everything before re-assembly.

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Notice reference marks made with Sharpie before I removed the skin to help in repositioning the  skin correctly.  The reason is that the bulkheads are a little flexible and will shift as the skin is re-positioned so using the the rivet holes alone as a reference isn’t good.

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Tomorrow I’ll get it zipped up (i.e. riveted) and start on the main gear install.  Sah-weeeet!

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