Template: Paint

Notes for the paint job.

Notes from Schu

1. When you fabric, buy some light fabric or medium tapes. Most tape is light fabric, but if you need to make a ring around something and use the medium you have on hand for the rest of the airplane, it looks like it sits up higher because the rest of the taping is light fabric. Make sure every tip of every tape is firmly glued down. It's better to have extra glue than to have a tip that doesn't want to lay flat. Take a paper towel and wipe down the fabric work when you are done, if anything catches, fix it now.
2. When you spray primer, use a 1.8 size tip to get a thick coat. Try to spray on horizontal surfaces. If you get a run, fix it with a nib file or very lightly sand with 80 grit to try and only knock down the high part.
3. When you sand the primer use quality sandpaper, cheap crap at home depot sucks, use dura-gold. Before you sand go find everything that is just below the surface and mark it with masking tape, if you sand over something that sticks up under the surface, it will cut through the fabric in 2 strokes. When sanding your tapes be very careful to not cut through the tape. Use 180 grit and very light pressure with the paper rapped in a soft sponge.
4. Try to sand everything as smooth as possible, but be careful around tape edges because you don't want to blend them because it looks terrible to have the tape disappear in some parts, but not in others. Generally speaking the flatter you can get stuff, the better.
5. When painting, mix (2) 28oz cups of paint at once because you need all of that to cover the fuse and you don't want to stop in the middle to mix more paint. Paint half of the fuse, swap the cups and finish the second half. Before you paint make sure you sweep, vaccum, sweep, vaccum, sweep, vaccum, then clean the fuse with zep foaming window cleaner, then tack rag. Wear a tyvek suit, cover your head/hair, clean and tack rag your mask, then clean and tack rag your air hose line and paint gun. Basically everything that enters the both is clean and tack ragged.
6. When painting try to paint horizontal, use 1.3 fluid tip, set gun for 22psi when air is open, tighten fan slightly, and set fluid adjustment for 1/2 turn less than wide open. This gives good atomization but doesn't paint to fast. Use 1/3 overlap and paint section perhaps 2-3ft wide back and forth from top to bottom then move to the next section. The more uniform your strokes are, the better it will work. Make sure you get around tailpost and other areas that may be hidden by the rotisserie.
7. You only need two coats, get one coat on, wait 4 days to harden (when it no longe smells like paint) then wet sand with 400 to get the surface even flatter, then paint the final coat.
8. In the end you want 2-3 coats of primer sanded smooth with 180 then 240. 1 coat of color to seal in the primer, wait 4 days, wet sand with 400, then final color. By the time you get to final color you should have your technique good enough to get a nice finish.