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