Cessna Vestal White Painting

 With the practice piece under our belt, we finally tackled the Cessna Vestal White color on the fuselage.  We had some areas that needed masking and then we painted a coat of the white paint.  Whew!  No Craters!  After the first coat dried we wet sanded with 600grit and applied a second and final coat.  We found a few dust particles in the paint so we decided to sand out the defects and then polish the paint back up to a glossy finish.  The polishing step took a lot of time.  We had areas on all three painted sides that needed attention.

Polishing Almost Done and playing with Paint Scheme

To remove the dust nibs we first wet sanded around the area with 600 grit sandpaper, followed by 1000 grit, then 2000 grit and finally 3000 grit sandpaper.  Then we got our our electric dual action polishers and went through four grits of polish to finally arrive at a nice glossy finish.

A few primer runs were found on the bottom of the fuselage where we will be painting the Ocala Orange color.  These were wet sanded out with 400 grit sandpaper.

We also started experimenting with paint layout.  We previously published a mock-up in X-plane of our paint scheme.  Due to the complexities of the original design, we decided to experiment with a simpler, but equally elegant side fuselage design.  Ed and I came up with a design that we're happy with and I again mocked up the scheme in X-Plane.

New Paint Scheme

Tracing paper was placed on top of the new design and traced. We will take this tracing and tweak the curves for a better shape.

Tracing Paint Scheme

Time: 20 hours