We finished downsizing the paintbooth, which also required modifying the front door panels to fit the new shape, adding some gasketing, and making sure everything was sealing correctly. With a smaller room, we can now keep the fuselage outside of the paint booth.
 |
| Paint booth for smaller parts |
We also have a temporary air outlet that we can setup before painting to exhaust the paint fumes out of the garage, and then disassemble after painting so that we can fit the fuselage back in the garage. This was constructed with two U-shaped pieces constructed with 2x4's on each end, along with two 10 ft 2x4's clamped to these pieces, and a single sheet of plastic clamped to the 2x4s. We can set this up in about 5 minutes and raise the garage door about 2 feet to allow the fumes to exhaust out the garage. Seems to work great.
 |
| Paint room with lower exhaust outlet |
We then prepped some smaller aluminum parts for paint. The baggage door has some pulled rivets, and we filled the holes with 3M filler and sanded them so that we would have a smoother surface. This door door, along with a few other parts (rear cover plate and side kick panels) were scuffed, cleaned, and hung in preparation for priming with an epoxy primer
 |
| Michael sanding rivet heads on baggage door |
We applied a coat of primer, but ran into an issue with some sort of contamination that caused fish-eye type craters in the primer coat. We allowed it to dry, sanded the coat of prime down to eliminate the fish-eyes, then adjusted some of our procedures to ensure we cleaned everything better and put new filters inline with our paint gun. We remixed some primer and tried respraying two days later day. Unfortunately, the contamination problem still exists so we haven't solved the problem. This is frustrating because we are using the same products and procedures that we have used in the past, yet we are getting these fish-eye blemishes. We will now go back to painting some practice parts until we get the issue corrected. Hours: 16
No comments:
Post a Comment