26 March 2018

Painting: Fairings preperation.

I'm not certain when I'll have the aircraft painted, or for that matter, what the paint scheme shall be.  To help prevent or slow UV damage to the fairings, I decided to prime the removable ones (I'll do the tip fairings and cowl halves later).  However, before doing so, the pin holes needed to be filled prior to priming.  My friend helped me significantly with this process.  

First I purchased a cheap orbital sander with extra 120 grit paper.  This was used to aggressively scuff the fairings.  The fairings were then thoroughly cleaned. 

Then we purchased Evercoat Easy Sand filler from the local autobody paint supply house.  The Easy Sand was mixed and ready to be applied with a spreader.


Judiciously spreading the putty over the fairings, the spreader was used to push the putty into the surface to fill the holes and then to remove excess.


Once the putty dries (which is in about 20 minutes), 200 grit paper was used to sand the surface back to smooth.  You can see all the pin holes that were filled.


Then we applied a high build primer from the auto body store (we first tried a can of Rust-Oleum - it was awful).  Below is an image following the first round of sanding, filling and priming.  You can see just how many pin holes remained.  We had to do three rounds before we got all (we hope) of the pin holes.


Next, I had to do the same for the S-606A Spinner Gap Fillers.  Of course, those are riveted on to the S-602-1 Spinner Plate, so the area needed to be masked off to prevent the putty and primer from sticking to things they shouldn't.  The image on the left is after the putty was applied.  The image on the right is following application of the high build primer.


Here is the final result with the S-601-1 Spinner reinstalled.

No comments:

Post a Comment