Fuselage paint issues

 We masked off the bottom of the plane, and shot a coat of the "Vestal White" top coat.  Unfortunately, after spraying the entire fuselage, we found thousand of divots had formed in this coat.  There are several things that may have contributed, and I'm not going to go into the details, but the end result is that we are going to have to sand down the coat of paint we just applied (down to primer) to get rid of the divots and then reshoot the paint.  We'll be making some adjustments and will definitely paint a practice piece to make sure we have this under control before painting the fuselage again. 

We encountered this issue last week, and after a week of sanding, we are not yet 1/2 done, so this is going to take some time to recover from.  Not fun, but we are stubborn and want the plane to look nice, so we'll keep on sanding until it's ready to paint again.  Hours: 15

A closeup of some divots that appears after shooting the topcoat.

  

Final Primer Coat

After we completed the wet sanding of the first coat of paint we wiped down the whole fuselage with Isopropyl Alcohol to remove any oils.  A final coat of primer was sprayed and allowed to dry.

Final Coat of Primer Applied

The fuselage was wet sanded with 600grit sandpaper removing any dust nibs and "fuzzies" around pinked tapes.  Extreme care was taken in this step as you don't want to sand through this UV protective layer and expose any fabric.

We've also been finalizing our fuselage paint scheme.  In our original design, there were a few areas where implementation was going to be difficult, so we made a few minor changes that should hopefully help out.

  

Hours: 7 hours