Fuselage paint prep

With the fuselage back in the garage, we started the prep work for paint.  We first removed the plastic wrap that was protecting the fuselage while it was in storage, put the fuselage on the rotisserie, removed the wheels, and then proceeded to remove the landing gear.   

This last item actually wasn't a trivial task as we needed lift the fuselage up a bit higher, then rotate it about 45 degrees to feed the gear legs through the fabric pass-thru, but the paint booth ceiling wasn't quite high enough to allow for this.  But we were able to take care of this by removing one 2x4 from the ceiling and bumping up the plastic a few inches.  This, along with the flexibility of the sheet plastic ceiling allowed us to rotate the fuselage enough to get the gear off.  

We did an initial clean-up of the fabric with isopropyl alcohol.  We noticed a few areas where there is some glue build-up, so we will go back and clean those up with acetone before masking for paint.

Hours: 6

Tires & landing gear removed

Wide-angle shot of the fuselage on the rotisserie

Wing and Fuselage Transport

 Another big day.  We carefully loaded up our newly painted wings onto a trailer, secured them in place with some straps, and transported them to the airport.  This gets them out of way so that we can start painting the fuselage.  Once at the hangar, we set them in a wing-sling and then covered them with some plastic for a little added protection. 

Wings loaded onto the trailer

Removing some residual masking tape

Wings secured in place with straps

 Ed & Mike in the hangar with the wings

Next we loaded up the fuselage for transport back to the home workshop/paint-booth. 

Loading the fuselage onto the trailer

Fuselage on its way to the paint room

We tucked the fuselage into the paint booth, and it does fit nicely.  We will actually be taking it off the gear again and putting it back on the rotisserie before painting.  Hours: 8

Fuselage back in paint room

Right Wing painting complete

 We sanded/polished a small section of the wingtip to fix a blemish in the orange.  We then removed the masking that was over the white section, and noticed one area where some orange had snuck around the masking and made a small splotch on the white portion of the wing.  There had to have been either a small tear in the masking plastic, or perhaps a small area where the masking tape peeled up.  That was annoying, but not a big deal to fix.  I sanded the splotches with 1000 grit until the orange was gone, then moved up to 2000 and 3000 grit... and then buffed with polishing compound to get back the shine.   We also had a small paint issue around the fuel filler cap where the white paint peeled up a bit with the masking tape.  We fixed this with a little bit of touch-up paint.  Hours: 4

Right wing painting completed

Touching up a small spot around filler cap

 

Painting Right Wing

 We masked off the right wing tip and painted the wing white, then once dried, masked off the white portion and painted the wingtip orange.  This is the same process we used for the left wing.  It would be easier to just paint the whole wing white and then paint the wingtip orange, but that uses more paint and adds more weight to the wing, so we opted to do this in two steps.  After spraying an orange coat, we immediately remove the strip of masking tape on the border between the orange and white.  This allows the orange paint (while still wet) to flow slightly onto the white to smooth the border (while still keeping a sharp line).  We sprayed 2 coats of orange, sanding between coats.  Before spraying another coat of orange, we reapplied masking tape at the border between white/orange.  This step only takes a few minutes, so is not a big deal and prevents a paint ridge from building up between the white and orange sections.

After the 2nd coat of orange dried, we noticed a decent sized paint defect in the orange on the top surface (an odd globule of paint, perhaps from the paint gun), so Michael shaved off the paint bump using a special razor tool, and we'll sand and polish that out next.  Hours: 9

Re-masking at the white/orange border