WingTip Painting

We moved from priming to painting for now.  The airplane is going to be mostly white, but the lower fuselage will be orange, and there will be other orange highlights.  The wingtips are planned to be orange, so we decided to paint those first to see how they look with some color.  

Michael mixing up some "Ocala Orange" paint

We first did a mist coat, and followed with a full cross coat.  The parts initially came out looking beautiful, but on closer inspection we noticed a huge run, and a lot of orange peel.  The run was due to a mistake where I had the gun fan spray set incorrectly for the direction I was spraying (newbie error).  We sanded the run down, and sanded so much that it needed to be repainting.  We ended up just sanding both parts and repainting. 

Parts with a coat of  shiny paint

The second time around, the parts came out much better with no runs, but we ended up with a lot of dust in the paint, even though we were using a paint booth to try and minimize this.  We decided to just carefully sand and polish the painted parts to get rid of the dust, which worked out fine, but was a lot of effort.  Next time we will take extra steps to further reduce the amount of dust on the parts.

Hours: 8