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At home, or in a good booth.... fly first or paint first?

these are the questions that have haunted me since I started this build. I decided long ago to paint before I fly. Then I thought I would do it myself at home...then after looking at material costs and talking with a friend, Corky who runs a body shop, I changed to painting it at his shop under his direction. Next decision was single stage or base/clear. Cost entered the equation about now. Some of single stages are very inexpensive and could probably paint my plane for $1000 in materials. I knew I wanted a good durable shine and showed Corky my prop, he suggested a few Base Clear systems from PPG and also Dupont. Cost was a little more but shine should be a few notches better. Also time in the shop & booth would be reduced with a Base Clear product.

So fast forward to this week. Wings are prepped, primed and ready for color, but the paint supplier messed up and sent the wrong stuff. We had wings in the booth with the clock ticking. I made a 1.5hr roundtrip run this morning to pick up the right stuff.

11am Corky is laying the yellow base


After the yellow flashes off we put the wingtips in place and start laying stripes


Here I am making a template for transferring the stripes

Lots of tape and paper later & around 4pm we have the Plum Crazy purple shot


Retape and shoot the Big Bad Green


here's the first view with the paper removed

me after I unmasked the wingtip


Everything looks good, so Corky says "now only thing left to do is make it pretty"

And that he did!




The pictures don't do it justice. The shine is amazing. An hour after the last clear coat, I asked, How will it look when it's dry? He touched the tape over the fuel cap and said it is dry....well almost don't touch the metal anywhere yet.

This is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO AWESOME Brian!! I love watching this all come together!! Keep up the progress pics! Like I had to say that...

Brian,

I'm SPEECHLESS!!! That's just so incredible, I don't have words. Can't wait to see it in person someday soon. When are you flying over this way? WOW!

Beautiful!!! I have mulled DYI painting, but without experience don't have the cajones. BTW - what type of tape did you use for the clean looking lines?

Dude that is sweet. Don't have a heart attack when reassembling that bad boy.

Niiiice

Finished wing 2 today. And the pics are about the same as yesterdays so I won't bore you with those.

But here is a pic of the tip when we hauled it outside.


Here's the leading edge pic. The blue should be purple, like a Vikings football helmet. I having trouble getting the purple color to show properly in the pics.


Got a bit of gloss to it.


Happy hour in the shop. Every afternoon guys stop by and shoot the breeze for a bit. We were in the middle of cleaning the booth before the clear coat work.


And we have another masterpiece

Carl, I'm not sure of the tape brand, I can find out. Corky said he always used the blue fine line tape for edges then green masking tape and 3M paper. Never has bleed through. I've painted cars before and done a pretty good job...years ago. I could have done an ok job in my garage, but wanted more. I'm ecstatic on how it is turning out.

Spike, I need to come up with some giant fleece wing condoms and bubble wrap.

That paint looks bad assssssssss.

Is that clouds reflecting in the purple?

Yep. It was actually hard to take a picture due to the reflections off it.

I also have to acknowledge Chad.

He help me put the designs and colors in my head to paper. Then Corky & I were able to take that sketch and put it in real paint.

Great big Thanks Chad.

I stopped by the paint shop this morning to check everything before work and Cork says "when is the Fuse going to be ready. I want to see this thing come together"