REFLECTOR: painting fuselage

Terry Miles terrence_miles at hotmail.com
Wed Oct 4 06:20:56 CDT 2006 

Scott,

I will get back in more detail over the weekend.  

It's been very long days of late and early morning sessions too, but
before the paint I gotta make a public thank you to Ken M (sorry I can't
spell Mishner? Right!)  I got a ride yesterday in his bird.  What a
thrill!

So back to the painting:

Scott, (and really too for the achives for the next guy) Here is just
some more stuff I did wrong and didn't know it.  

1.  We painted w/ a 320 sand out, on a primer paint job that was poorly
applied in that I made no attempt to find or make a paint booth.  We
just did it in the shop open to all the dust around here.  I didn't
think it would matter since I planned to sand it out anyway.  It did.
You have to get rid of all the orange peel.  I figured it would be
hidden--esp since it doesn't look bad at this stage of it.  With fresh
paint. all kinds of things show up.  I needed to do way more sanding--it
would have been smarter to be more careful, more demanding of myself,
right from the start.

2.  Next we stuffed both wings and carnard in the booth all together and
congratulated ourselves on wonderful spacing for the painter to walk
around.  He could.  So did all the over spray, and that added to orange
peel issues.  

3.  Spend the money or go rent one but get a big 6 hp or so compressor
with a big 80 gal or more tank.  I did my wings with a 3 hp 115V thing
chained into another storage tank and it added to my problems when
recovery time was so long.  Plus it is one more worry for the painter
who has enuf on his mind without questioning line pressure and how
stable it is. 

4.  I decided to re-id both wings.  First they were sanded back out to
600.  I never burnt thru the clear doing this--but I was able to remove
any trace of orange peel and all the light speckle spots.  Then a gray
sealer coat went on.  This was done since my white dupont paint soaked
in everwhere where I had WestSys 410 pin holes filled.  Also I think the
color itself was blotchie maybe for not enuf color coat going down to
start with, or the fact that white that is not "primer" doesn't hide
anything.  This color coat cover issues was in part due to in adequate
lighting.  Scott I agree with you there.  I have this abandoned paint
booth available to me.  It is bad shape and the light was bad due to
burnt out lighting systems--but you don't realize it until you have to
paint.  For the 2nd go at things, I went out and spent $60 plus and put
in new ballasts and bulbs as needed and cleaned the lens everywhere too.
On the first go I used 4 harbor frgt halogens stands--which worked OK
but had hard shadows and bright reflections which were a problem, but
not apparent as a problem until you have a paint gun in your hands and
looking for misses.  The fluo bulbs gave a much more even light.  If I
had to do this again I would have made up a home made fluo light sys
rather than off-the-shelf halogen stands.  Brighter is not better than
full and even. 

Scott, thanks for the tip on the stake overspray thing.  I have a race
team painter (ARCO and Busch) helping me now part time.  We are
presently finishing up the sand/prep to the fuseage and going over the
paint sequence.  I will have a lot of trim paint on the underbelly.  He
wants to paint the trim first.  I would have done all the white and do
the color trim 2nd.  So we are still looking at this sequence issue.
Also we don't have your pressure pot setup.  But I plan likely to do the
belly first.  We hope to pitch the nose high as the booth will permit.
We will be moving it down to the booth tomorrow and doing a dry run on
all this to see what will work the best.

..to be continued.  Good luck with yours.  On removing runs, the race
guy used a utility razor.  He cut off the tit of the run and then
removed the stream part of it by scrape motions of the blade with the
sharp edge being the trailing edge of each stroke.  It came off like
crumbs from a rubber eraser.  So slow.

Terry




-----Original Message-----
From: reflector-bounces at tvbf.org [mailto:reflector-bounces at tvbf.org] On
Behalf Of Scott Derrick
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 5:48 PM
To: Velocity Aircraft Owners and Builders list
Subject: Re: REFLECTOR: painting fuselage


Terry,

I did the tack coat bottom upand just didn't like how I ended up
overspraying the top of the strakes when I painted the top of the
fuselage. So I painted the cover coat top to bottom.

top rear,
top right front cover to nose
top left front
top left strake, go over leading edge to about 6inches under top right
strake, continue over edge to cover right bottom strake bottom left
strake left side to half way under fusalage whole lenght right side to
meet wet edge running down middle of fuselage bottom

You can't have to many lights, I had 4 halogens, two were doubles on
stands.  I was moving them all the time, more would have been easier.

Practice on the wings first.  I have to repaint one wing... I still
ended up with a few runs, hopefully I can pull a few trcks to hide
them..

Scott

> Scott,
> Maybe I missed it, but....what painting sequence did you decide on,
> and what would you have to offer back? Terry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: reflector-bounces at tvbf.org [mailto:reflector-bounces at tvbf.org]
> On Behalf Of martyh
> Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 10:20 PM
> To: Velocity Aircraft Owners and Builders list
> Subject: Re: REFLECTOR: painting fuselage
>
>
> I'd Paint the top of the fuselage before i did the strakes, thinks
> about it.
>
> Marty
>
>
>
>> I'm a couple days from painting my fuselage .
>>
>> The wings are off.   Any hints on the perfect sequence?
>>
>> My plan is paint the bottom of the fuselage, then the
>> bottom of the left  strake, bottom of right strake, top of left
>> strake, top of right strake,  top of fuselage..
>>
>> Scott
>>
>> --
>>
>> -
>>     The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public
>> opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The

>> agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep 
>> the waters pure.
>>
>>     Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823. ME 15:491
>>
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