First off, wow, what a massive amount of work to paint the plane. I thought filling, sanding, priming (repeat) was a lot of work – painting was about the same amount of work, but condensed into some long days – pretty intense.
Anyway, I decided to have a local painter paint the plane for me. I’d been hemming and hawing for months now how I would paint the plane. I waffled between painting it myself at home by setting up a temporary paint tent, to painting at the hangar, but having a local painter come by to help, to having a local body shop paint it. I ended up deciding on the latter. I’ve known Kent at Armor Auto body for quite a while. I first met him when I asked him to paint a Porsche 911 I refinished. He’s always very busy, but I dropped by and asked if we could paint my plane the next weekend. Even though he was busy, he said he could fit it in. I spent that weekend and all the next week going over the entire plane dealing with any little defects. The previous weekend I had put the wings on and set the angle of incidence – I had to do some filling between the strake and right wing. I figured it was in great shape for painting.
The body shop was in the same town as I live in, so I didn’t have to haul the plane too far. Initially, I thought I’d get a trailer wide enough to accommodate the wheel track width. But, then decided to remove the main gear so I could do a better job painting it. I wanted to paint the wheel wells a different color than white, too. When I took the main gear off, I was able to load the fuselage onto my utility trailer. It was actually a really easy way to move it. I put the half-moon supports on the back of the plane, lifted the nose up, slid the trailer underneath then lowered the belly down onto the trailer. You can see in one of the pictures below that I used my garden tractor to pull the trailer around to my driveway (my shop is in the back yard around the back of my house, so this saved me driving my truck on my lawn). Once the fuselage was moved over, the wings were pretty easy.
Now came the hard part. I thought I had the plane ready for paint. Kent went over it and found lots of pin holes and little detail issues. He showed my how to fill pin holes quickly while he took care of some of the other details. Because I had burned though the primer in a number of places we decided to put a sealer down first before the first coat. This would also create better adhesion for the paint.
The plane was masked and the sealer was down, the first coat of paint had to be put on quickly, then we could start with masking the striping. We spent a couple late nights Saturday and Sunday putting the stripes on. Here’s the process we used: There were four colors on the plane, the base white, black for the N-numbers and a two-tone burgundy/silver stripe as well as around the windows. After having the first base coat down, we sprayed silver approx where the stripe would go and around the windows. Then, we masked off the silver stripe and where silver would be between the windows. Then it was the burgundy – same thing, spray it approx where it would go and mask off the stripe and around the windows.
The N-Numbers were a huge effort. I wanted 12″ N-Numbers so I could travel to Canada and the Caribbean. Rather than just solid black lettering, I wanted black outline, white in the middle. What made this challenging is that the N-Numbers were over the stripe. I had stencils made for the N-Numbers, so we put the stencils on, sprayed black and removed the stencils. The stencil I had cut for the interior of the number came out too large, so we had to manually mask the interior of each letter so that we could keep the interior white. It took several hours to get that right.
Kent needed room, so we decided to prep and paint the wings so I could move them out of his shop. As soon as the first coat of white paint went on, we saw a bunch of pin holes show up. Another couple hours of work to fill those up, then on with a couple more coats of paint and clear.
Finally, after all the striping and letters were done, we could put the remaining base coats on and clear. It took a lot of paint and a couple gallons of clear. I don’t know the end tally, but I mixed a lot of paint. There’s a lot of surface area on these planes. Kent’s arm was pretty tired by the end. We actually painted the wings first one day, then the fuselage the next day. Once we’d put all the base coats down, it was time for the big reveal. All the masking covering the stripes and around the windows needed to be removed before clearing. Pretty awesome after all that work to peel the tape off to see an all-white plane to come to life with color. To be perfectly honest, I was a bit disappointed at this point. Maybe I was just tired, or maybe it was because it looked a bit dull without any clear on.
There were a bunch of small defects in the stripes and lettering that needed to be corrected – these were really bothering me. I wasn’t sure we could correct all these. But, Kent and I went to work and corrected ever little detail. It took re-masking and respraying both colors, and some fine brush work on the letters, but a few hours later, it was all cleaned up and ready for clear.
I had to go to work, so Kent finished it off with clear. I dropped by after work and found a beautiful, shiny fuselage waiting for me. It really turned out great. There are a couple little defects, and the strakes and wings have several wiggles in them, but all-in-all, I’m very pleased with it. I let it cure for a couple days, then loaded it back on the trailer, this time it was not going back home, but into my hangar at KORH.
In retrospect, I’m glad I took it to Kent to paint. The whole job took two weeks (not full time). Really two full weekends, and a few evenings during the week. The last parts (canard, elevators, ailereons, and main gear) were cleared last night. It was great to work along side a professional. While it was a massive amount of work, it was worth it. I’m not sure it would have turned out anything like this had I done it myself. Having access to all the body shop tools and supplies made a huge difference. Also, Kent is very big on details and it shows. I’m glad that this phase is done. Now its at the hangar and I’m on the home stretch.