Horizontal stab skin scratched

[aviationgeek84]

Hi All,

I began removing the blue plastic from my horizontal stab skins yesterday and found a scratch underneath the plastic. I have attached a photo below:



Not the best picture, but.. hopefully enough to show what's up. I emailed Van's and they suggested buffing it out with a Scotchbrite pad. Can anyone tell me the safest/best way to do this without causing more damage to the skin surface?

A little discouraged... all my of work to keep things looking nice, and now this shows up.

Thanks!

[mark schoening]

Assuming your're painting, my paint guy said " don't try to "fix" any boo-boo", as more damage is done by doing this. Said let him fix stuff (including rivit tool dings, scratches, dents caused by dropped tools and bucking bars) Aluminum is unforgiving of cosmetic oops, so keep on building- more "stuff" will happen in the building process. Trust me

[rv9av8tr]

I'd say take a scotchbrite pad and give it some elbow grease to smooth it out.

[flion]

I agree with Mark. At most, a light shot of primer if it looks deep enough to catch a fingernail in. It's hard to tell depth from your photo, but a lot of light scratches look horrible on a shiny aluminum surface but fail to penetrate the alclad.

On the other hand, if you are polishing, then depending on the depth of the scratch I'd either leave it alone or replace it. If it's shallow enough to leave alone then it won't corrode and you can polish it out when you do the finish.

[aviationgeek84]

I would say that it doesn't "catch" a fingernail hardly at all... and I do plan to paint at some point, not polish.

[JonJay]

Most pro painters will scratch the heck out of your skins beyond anything I ever imagined. That is a minor scratch.

[hydroguy2]

yep, time to move on....there's plenty more where that one came from