Work on the plane had slowed a bit the past week or two because I was studying and practicing for my private pilot checkride (Michael is already a pilot, but I was not). All the hard work paid off and I got my pilot's certificate this past week, so I was elated.
On the airplane, we applied a few coats of primer to the new patch tapes we applied. We followed this by shooting a light primer coat over the whole fuselage. We did this because the primer was thinned in some areas due to all the sanding that was done to remove the layer of bad paint. After priming we then did a light (wet) sanding of this last primer coat to prep it for paint.
Since we had problems with paint craters the last time we painted, we decided to play it safe and paint a practice piece first. We grabbed a fabric framed piece that we previously used for practicing fabric/paint work, sanded it, cleaned it up, and hung it up in the paint booth. This time around we
made sure we mixed everything correctly, used our best filters for the paint, ensured the compressed air filter had fresh desiccant installed, drained residual water from the air compressor, cleaned the part thoroughly and wiped with tack cloth before spraying, and sprayed a tack coat before the final coat. Everything went perfect and the coat of paint came out without any craters or blemishes. Now we just hope we have the same experience when we paint the fuselage. Hours: 7.5
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| Painting a practice piece to see if issue was resolved |
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