Paint: Vinyl wrap experiment.

I had planned to get the plane painted this year, but recent global events have put those plans on hold, so I thought to experiment with possibly wrapping the aircraft in vinyl.  I decided to wrap my "spare rudder" as a learning experience.  I bought some pieces of "3M Wrap Film Series 1080" and gave things a whirl.

Draping one piece over the rudder shows that the vinyl needed to be trimmed (left).  So I setup to cut it in half (right).

The piece has been applied (left) and you can see the "knifeless tape" which is used to cleanly cut patterns out (or in?).  Following removal of the knifeless tape (if you do it wrong, the "knifeless" tape knifes in to your thumb!), the next chunk of rudder is ready for the next colored piece of vinyl.

Here is the final result.

Close-ups showing how well the vinyl can be made to conform to the surface profile around the rivets and seams (you can also see why I discarded this rudder by viewing its trailing edge).

Next I thought to place some test pieces on the plane itself to see how it would hold up.  Here I put a piece around the tank fill hole.

And some pieces on the wing, forward top skin and even the un-prepped (i.e., "pin-holed") cowl.

 

There was some learning going on.  For example, it's important to wrap around edges, non-flat surfaces are hard to wrap and pin holes in the cowl must be filled (on my first flight, the vinyl bubbled due to the heat pushing air through the pin holes as shown below). 

Finish: Cowling. Reshaping.

As I think about painting and/or wrapping the plane in vinyl, I started to do some prep work on the cowl.  One item that needed to be done was fixing the misalignment on the front:  The top cowl half sits just a bit behind the bottom cowl half.

So I marked off the area that needed to be evened up, scuffed it and protected the areas around it, in prep for filling with epoxy.

I mixed up some epoxy with flox and cab-o-sil and applied the mixture, using peel-ply overlapping the bottom cowl, pulled tightly, to force conformation of the area to match the bottom cowl.

Following sanding, it didn't look too bad, but I still didn't like the shape, specifically how the top half's curve seemed a little off now.

So try #2 (I feel like everything I do on this plane takes two or three tries) shows my attempt at redoing the curve at the top.

Following sanding, it actually came out pretty good.

I then applied some Evercoat Easy Sand to fill the pin holes and even up the flat spots. Even though that layer is very thin, I don't know how smart that was because Easy Sand can break off under stress. We'll see how it does under the relentless onslaught of insects before I commit to it prior to painint/vinyl.

Painting: Canopy fairing paint prep.

In preparation for painting the aircraft this summer, I needed to remove pinholes and otherwise smooth out the canopy fairing. To do this, I chose to use Evercoat Easy Sand filler.  Note:  In August, I ended up covering this area with vinyl.

Application. 

Following final sanding.  You can really see where the fairing wasn't a uniform surface profile.