Left Wing Painted

 We painted the left wing in a few stages. Since the wing is two colors (orange and white). We first masked off the wingtip (which will be orange) and applied the white paint, shooting a fog coat and full coat, then sanded it before shooting the final coat.  The final coat did not have much dust in it so we are opting not to sand/buff it right now.  We can always do that later if we decide if we want to improve the surface smoothness.  We then masked off the white portion and painted the wingtip Ocala Orange.  We made a minor mistake on positioning of the masking tape (tape was over too far by about 1/2 inch), so remasked it and sprayed some more orange to fix this.  Came out pretty nice. We also plan to add a black stripe at the border between the orange and white, but will do this with vinyl at a later stage.

Once it was nice and dry, we moved the left wing back into the shed for storage, and moved the right wing into the garage to prep it for paint.

The two builders in front of the painted left wing

Nice shiny wing (Michael is removing masking over the fuel cap)

Once the right wing was in place, we closed up the large front panel of the paint booth and started prepping the wing for paint.  Hours: 12

Left wing moved into paint booth

Elevators & Rudder paint, Wing prep

 We did some additional work to clean up paint job on the elevators and rudder.  We thought we had a run in the freshly painted orange section on one of the elevators, but after closer inspection and a bit of sanding, we found it was actually a run in the primer coat underneath the orange.  So somehow we missed that run after shooting the primer, but it showed it showed up prominently once we sprayed some orange on top.   To fix that one, we sanded down until we could get the run out of the primer coat, and then resprayed the orange.  We also sanded out some dust nibs and buffed the parts to bring back the shine.

Painting completed on rudder and elevators

Next we cleaned up the paint booth, opened the front doors, and moved the left wing from the shed back into the paint booth.  Our next task will be to paint the majority of the left wing with Vestal White.  Hours: 8

Paint booth opened up and ready for a wing

Elevators, Ailerons, & Rudder with some Orange Paint

We masked off a section of  the elevators, rudder, and ailerons so that we could paint the ends orange.  We first sprayed the ailerons, and once dried, we did a little sanding and buffing to take care of some dust nibs that always seem to find their way in the paint.  In the final paint job, we will have a 1" black stripe on the border between the white and orange.  We will likely do this in vinyl, but on sections of the plane with curved lines, we may paint them black if the vinyl tape doesn't conform nicely to the curves.

Ailerons with a nice coat of orange

Then we moved on to the elevators and rudder and shot them with some orange.  We will inspect and sand/buff as necessary to take care of dust or any other defects we find.  Hours: 8

Rudder and elevators with a coat of orange

Painting Elevators & Ailerons

We continued the painting (white paint coats) and buffing work on the elevators and ailerons.  Did a bit of sanding to remove several dust nibs in the paint, and then quite a bit of polishing to get rid of the sanding marks and shine it back up.  One of the ailerons still needs another shot of white paint.  We also masked off the elevators so they will be ready for some coats of orange on the ends.  Hours:8

Michael masking off an elevator