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My Approach: As I came upon the painting phase of my aircraft the light at the end of the tunnel was becoming blindingly bright. Many new homebuilts fly in the primer stage, some for many years before seeing finish paint. I decided to try to get the plane as close to "finished" as I could handle before committing it to the sky. Some of my reasons for this are: I wanted to be comfortable with water operations and not worry about water mucking up any of the glasswork. I wanted to fly the project without the specter of having to disassemble & ground it for months to paint it. And mostly I desired for the project to be "complete" I'm a little anal about something actually being completely finished when I consider myself "done". I am well aware that this may come back to bite me a little bit as I debug the aircraft during the flight testing phase, but hopefully the flight testing will not require any major alterations to the airframe.
Quality Factor: I will say up front that although I would love to have the perfect paint job I decided to go for something in the 90% range. Looks good, nothing abhorrent, but if you look close enough you can find plenty of flaws. Part of the reasoning for this approach is that it takes a tremendous amount of time to prep an aircraft for a show quality paint job. I could have easily spent another six months sanding and filling and getting it perfect - and probably adding 100 lbs of fillers. But I did not want to spend that kind of time on it, and I wanted to stick to the "add only lightness" credo. I am also painting the plane in a very old dusty hangar with plenty of air leaks. I am painting on the northern California coast where it is notoriously foggy much of the time and it is windy all of the time. Then with the exception of a few heat waves the temperature rarely gets to 70 degrees at any point during the year. All of these factors added up to a reality check where I knew that even if I was so motivated I would not be able to get superior quality at my current location.
Materials: About six years ago I
decided to paint the bottom section of the hull before flipping it upright.
It was at this point that
I went to one of my local paint
dealers and walked out with a gallon of Imron 5000 2.8 VOC "National Fleet
White". Imron is not one of the easier paints to deal with but it
has a reputation of being bulletproof. The 5000 series is a one coat
system, that means the shine in in the base coat, no top clear coat is
necessary. To anyone who does not want to spend a year painting their
aircraft I highly recommend a single coat/stage system. it is less
work, and offers less opportunity to screw up. I have not used
other paints so I have no point of comparison for the Imron 5000.
I will say that once you figure out how to reduce it and apply it that
you can get good results, and you can color sand the nonmetallic colors
to a really nice gloss without too much trouble. Using a forced air
respirator is a must as the stuff will literally kill you. It is
chocked full of Iso-Cyanates and you are asking for liver damage if you
only use a basic filter type face mask. Don't _UCK around with
this stuff! Use a fresh air respirator!
The Color Scheme: Believe it or not I did not have a color layout for the fuselage in mind until literally a week before applying the stripes. For the wings, I just eyeballed some stripes and taped them off without any paper planning. I copied the basic concept of N777CBs paint scheme and tweaked it to make it my own. As for color choice, early on I went with a slightly off white for the base coat. Then for the stripes, I wanted to go with a deep burgandy/crimson main stripe with black borders. After spraying the main stripe on, I discovered that the guys at the paint store messed up as the color is not quite what I thought it was going to be, it did not match the swatch book very well. I was initially disappointed, however everybody that saw the color loved it and I have also warmed up to it. It is at the least, different, and certainly my own.
Prep work: I tried pretty hard during the construction of the plane to bring the surfaces up to a 90% finished state. By this I mean fill all of the weave of the fiberglass and use fillers as needed to blend the body panels together. When it came time to paint, generally I would go over the area and fill in any areas that I may have missed, then shoot a quick coat of primer which would inevitably expose several areas that needed a bit more filler. I would fix up these areas and then shoot at least three, and as many as six coats of Polyfibers UV Smooth Prime. The UV Smooth Prime is a great product. It is a bit expensive but it is a real time saver. It fills any missed weave and totally fills in pin holes. I love the stuff, but like I said it isn't cheap and you use a lot of it, most of which ends up getting sanded off and vacuumed off of the floor! Sanding the UV Smooth Prime was initially done with 180 grit using fairing boards and soft sponge sanding blocks. Once the surface was leveled I would go to 320 grit. Then after this first phase of priming and sanding, I would do a second phase but only shooting the spots locally that needed it.
Spraying: You learn a lot painting an airplane. In general you learn the most about the technique of applying paint. And each paint system is different. Speaking with the folks at the paint store about learning to do the work, they said that they pretty much figured it out the same way, by painting some cars, screwing up and doing them again. When applying the white base coat to the fuselage, I was not successful at getting it to flow out. I did however apply enough paint that I will have no problem color sanding it. The flow problem was mostly because I did not lay it on heavy enough, and this was mostly due to trying to cover too much area too quickly. A plane is a big area to paint. When spraying the wings I laid it on heavy and it flowed out very nicely. The Metallic red proved to be a real challenge as well. I had no flow out problems because I was painting less area. However I did get some tiger striping. In the smaller areas it was easy to get the red on without getting tiger stripe lines. For the larger areas the metallic worked best when sprayed on with the usual cross coat, and then I found to get a good uniform metallic look, I would have to mist over the area in random directions "teasing" the area until the metal all seemed uniform. This requires a good eye and lots of light hitting the area, and even then, some spots were not as even as I would have liked them to be.
Learning: Asides from the application
lessons mentioned above. I should have laid out the stripes on the
fuselage before laying the white on, it would have been much easier as
it would have allowed me to paint the white in sections instead of trying
to cover the whole plane. If I had done this, I would have been able
to get the paint to flow better as I could have focused on one area at
a time and worry about moving fast enough to cover while still keeping
a wet edge. It also would have saved paint and weight. I also
discovered that the Imron flows out much better if I just laid it on pretty
heavy. Two heavy coats, one vertical and one horizontal, applied
correctly would flow out nicely and looked great.
If I were going to paint again, I would
stick with one brand for the Filling Primer, Primer, sealer, topcoat, surface
cleaner, tack cloths, everything. Many issues came up with incompatibility
between products. People have also had issues with the UV Smooth
prime once it is in service. Hopefully I will not become one of these!
It would really suck to have to repaint because of a bad primer.
12/15/06 Addendum:
Murphy Loves homebuilders who try to
paint their own aircraft!
As I wrap up painting my Aircar, there
are only a few stripes to finish off, I can say that Murphy had a pretty
good time with me. I consider myself "generally careful and meticulous"
maybe not as careful as some, but more than most. Yet somehow I managed
to find every manner possible to mess things up here or there with the
paint. Sure Overall it looks fine, and once I get done color sanding
any mistakes away it might even look great. But boy have I learned
a thing or two about painting! I started the painting project with
a great attitude and poor technique, and as I finish up I have a bad attitude
and decent technique. Here are some ways that Ole Murph had his way
with me....
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