Elevators & Aileron Painting

 After the upgrades to the paint booth, we decided to move on and paint the elevators white (the tips will be painted orange later).  Before painting, we also added a small paint inlet filter to the gun to further reduce chances of dust getting in the paint.  After shooting the elevators, we were still disappointed that there is some dust in the paint. It does seem a little better than before, but not as good as we were hoping for.  Don't know how it's getting there, but at this point we are resigned to just continue on and fix the dust issues as they arise. Some of the dust particles are just small specs which aren't a big deal, but a few have larger hair-like structure which doesn't look great. Yeah, the plane will fly just fine with dust in the paint, but I guess we are too much of perfectionists to leave it alone, so we will just sand/buff those out when we have to.

Elevator painted white

We went back to the ailerons which needed some additional work.  We had a paint sag in one of the ailerons, so we used a "bondo" method to sand it out.  This is done by applying a layer of bondo over the defect, then sanding it with a flat block until the bondo is all gone.  The bondo helps protect the paint and fabric around the sag  during the sanding process so that the sag can be removed without damaging anything else in the process.

Aileron with (temporary) Bondo

After sanding this area, we also sanded the areas with dust on both the ailerons.  One aileron just needs to be buffed and polished up now, but the second aileron had a few areas where the sanding went down to primer, so we need to reshoot that one.  Hours: 12

Aileron painting, plus upgrades to paint room

We masked off part of the ailerons and painted them Vestal White.  One of the parts has a paint sag in one area that will need to be fixed (my mistake for spraying a little too thick of a coat near one of the hinges).  More disappointing is that we are still getting dust in the paint which creates even more work for us later.  

    

We decided to stop painting for a while and make some more improvements to the paint booth.  Instead of using air filters from Home Depot, we decided to buy some inlet and exhaust filters from Amazon that are made for paint booths.  The hope here is that we will get improved filtration and better airflow.  We also added a 3rd inlet fan to our room to improve airflow. We also bought some additional rolls of plastic sheeting, and added a layer of plastic to the inside of the room.  This encapsulates the 2x4 framing so that dust can't setting on the framing and later release back into the air.  We should be able to control the dust on the plastic by using a common trick of spraying the plastic with water prior to painting. Hopefully all of these measures will help reduce the dust level in the room.  We wanted to make these changes now before we painted the fuselage and the wings so that we had the best chance of getting a really good paint job on those parts.

While we were making changes to the paint room, we decided to add a couple more LED lights to help lighten up some areas that were a little dimmer.  Good lighting is very useful to see the paint as it's being sprayed, and also to see any defects early on.   Hours: 12

3rd inlet fan added on the left side

New inlet filters

New layer of plastic, and new LED light on end walls

Chicken wire on backside to hold exhaust filters in place

Four new exhaust filters installed

Painted Rudder and Horizontal Stabilizers

The top of the rudder was masked off (this section will be painted orange later), and then we painted the rudder and both horizontal stabilizers. Had one minor paint run which was trivial to sand off, and had some overspray which took a bit of effort to buff/polish away.  Next time, we will mask off the back side when spraying the front side to eliminate this overspray, which is a recommendation we got from another builder.   This masking will take some extra time, and another downside of this method is that we will get ridges at the tape lines, but these should be easier to buff off then the overspray because there will be much less surface area to cover.We are still getting some dust in the paint which is a bit disappointing, but at least there is much less dust now then when we started.  

Ed masking off the top of the rudder

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Horizontal Stabilizers painted

After painting these parts, we cleaned out the paint room thoroughly to try to reduce the dust.  We will also change the filters before the next painting session.

Next we prep'd the ailerons for paint.  These will also have orange at one end, so we masked off the ends as we will be painting white first.  We could have just painted the entire thing white and then layered orange over the white... but that adds more weight which isn't needed, so we decided to save a few ounces by masking off the areas that will be painted orange. Hours: 9

Ailerons masked off and ready for paint