Painting the interior (while trying to build the gas tank)

For various reasons, I decided to go ahead and build the gas tank, something I expected to be an odious task and it didn't disappoint.  The building of the tank involves choreographing the rivet installations (eight different kinds I think), each of which must be cleaned with naphtha and smeared with the Devil's Own Glue called Proseal (it actually has a new name but everyone still calls it Proseal), which has a two-hour pot life.  Reading ahead in the build manual, I saw that one part of the tank build required centering the filler neck in a hole in the turtle deck.  Well, it turns out that I had

delayed installing the turtle deck to give plenty of room to do some critical drilling in the flaperon actuation linkage when that got installed.  I therefore needed to proceed with the installation of the flaperon linkage, the first instruction of which read "Install the wings."  In a post back in May (the subtitle of which is "dumb-assery on display") I detailed my attempts to persuade the wing spars to fully insert into the fuselage (didn't happen).  I now had no choice but to complete the wing installation.  The gas tank and the wing fit will be described in a future posts.

For some reason people who build RVs like to paint the interiors gray.  I'm no exception, although the dark gray I had envisioned couldn't be found in flat or matte finish.  Custom colors can be had in a rattle can but the cost is prohibitive.  I had primed the inside surfaces of all panels forward of the rear bulkhead using NAPA 7220 which is light

gray.  I finally settled for Krylon Colormax Matte Deep Gray as a top coat for everything but the roll structure (shown above).  The roll bar is still in primer, but it's hard to see the difference in the pic.  I definitely wanted a darker color for the roll structure, so once again I settled (like settling for a girl friend when you're sure you could do better but you're tired of looking) for Rust-oleum Universal Metallic Flat Soft Iron.  I found both of these on the aviation aisle at Lowe's.  In reference to the aforementioned settling, I put all that permanently behind me when, after looking for love in several wrong places, I committed holy matrimony with Dr. KTH (as her students call her) in 2009.

After painting everything but the roll structure, I masked as shown in the pic and painted the roll bar and the longitudinal member running aft from the roll bar which is not visible in this view.
All in all, I'm happy with the results.  Adding the turtle deck made everything look much better (last two pics).  We're on spring break, so I'm off the rest of the week and should be able to complete the tank.  I resisted the urge to spend the week in Colorado.  My webcams at my house there show a lot of snow, so I made a good decision.

Looking at my blog, I noticed that I haven't posted since attending the Oshkosh show for the 30th time last July.  The highlight of the show, I suppose, was watching the Van's crew and thousands of volunteers build the One Week Wonder, a complete, flyable RV-12iS built in one week.  Made me feel kinda bad considering I've been working on mine since 2011.