Painting Complete

[kmacht]

Just got my fuselage back from the paint shop yesterday and thought some of you might like to see pictures of the process. I used an auto repair shop that does custom paint work on the side. They came highly recommended from a number of people. What was really cool is that they posted daily pictures of the progress on their facebook page so I could see progress as it happened. The entire process from start to finish took about a week and a half. The paint is a a PPG Base coat / Clear coat. Although hard to see in the pictures the blue on the top has some metallic in it. The plane is also missing some of its parts like the rudder, cover plates, wheel pants, etc. They were clear coating those today and will be ready to pick up next week so that is why they are missing in the pictures.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

The first step was to do some minor repairs on the vertical tail tip. When I loaded the plane up on the trailer I didn't notice how close I was to my garage and as I was pulling it up and my wife and father were pushing I smacked the vertical tail tip right into the board above my garage door. it cracked the fiberglass gel coat near the bottom of the tip just past the end of the rib. As you can imagine there was a lot of creative use of the English language being used right after that happened. The paint shop was great about it and fixed the fiberglass for no extra charge.

Oh yeah. I forgot to mention that I did the epoxy primer on the cowling. After doing the horizontal split modification there was a ton of work to be done to get the seam between the right and left side smooth. After I was done I was worried about getting oil or other contaminants in the fiberglass and filler so I shot some epoxy primer on the cowl. The resulting orange peel and marks left from a leaf falling on the wet paint (don't paint in your driveway during the fall in the North East) was enough to convince me that I didn't really want to take on the rest of the plane.

[kmacht]

Next up was to prep the metal for the paint. They used stuff called Pre-Kote. It is an aviation specific product meant to prep aluminum for paint. You pretty much spray it on in small sections, scrub it with some red scotchbrite pads and then wash it off. The stuff is non-toxic so they didn't have to worry about where the drain water went or getting it on their skin like you do with a normal acid etch.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

After it dried the plane was rolled into the paint booth to mask up some spots like the spar tunnel and air vents and then shoot some primer on it. Painting the underside was a bit of a challenge but they were able to hold the tail up with a chain enough to crawl under there.

The guy in the pictures on the right is the painter. He is the one that did most of the work.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

Here it is all primed. They used a white epoxy primer made by Transtar.

Keith
#554

Primered.jpg (98.04 KiB) Viewed 4714 times

[kmacht]

After some sanding to fix any imperfections they shot the whole plane in basecoat white. It doesn't look much different than the primer other than being a little bit more smooth and shiny.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

Now comes the fun part to watch although I don't think this was the painters favorite part. They masked up the blue, red, and black. I took a picture of a sonex and drew some rough sketches in photoshop for them to work off of. I am no artist but I think they got it almost exactly as I had pictured it. One thing I did learn while doing this project is that going with a fancy paint scheme wasn't that much more expensive than just using a standard one or two colored paint job. It did not cost any more to make the lines curved than it would have to make them straight and adding more colors just added an extra hour or two of masking. Having the N-number painted also cost no more than it would have been to do them in vinyl. They just had the vinyl numbers made and put them on top of the white (see the red vinyl in the picture) before spraying the blue. Once the blue dried they peeled them off and you were left with perfect white n numbers on a blue background.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

Here it is after they sprayed the base coat colors. It looks good here but doesn't get the deep shine and the metallic in the blue doesn't start popping until the clear is put on.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

And here it is with the clear put on. They did 3 coats of clear on top of the basecoat. The painter laid it down so smooth it doesn't even need any color sanding or buffing. The pictures don't do it justice as to just how deep the paint looks.

Keith
#554

[kmacht]

Here they are after pulling the masking and putting the final touches on it at the paint shop.

Keith
#554