Painting my own plane

[mooneysteve]

I did my paint, time consuming but worth it. Check out my past posts to see.

[aviatoreb]

On 6/21/2022 at 7:58 AM, JayMatt said:

After plenty of research, I've decided to pain my own aircraft. Anyone on here do that and want to talk about it? Would love to hear about your experience and what you thought of the whole thing. 

Regards,

I think it is ironic and sort of funny that you mistyped paint as pain - since surely painting your own airplane is a painfully difficult job - but I am excited to read about your experience.  Good luck!

[JayMatt]

24 minutes ago, mooneysteve said:

I did my paint, time consuming but worth it. Check out my past posts to see.

couldn't actually find it in your post history, would love to check it out if you could send me a link

[Hector]

Painted my bird myself. Not difficult to do. 2K urethane. Scuff sanded until I removed most of the topcoat, but not the primer coat. Get the proper equipment and learn how to use it, including forced air respirator. Lots of YouTube videos to get you started. I also did prime all the rivet lines just to promote good paint adhesion. Not perfect by any means but only a few days and less than $2k all in including all the equipment/tools and paint supplies.


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[M20F]

35 minutes ago, Hector said:

Painted my bird myself. Not difficult to do. 2K urethane. Scuff sanded until I removed most of the topcoat, but not the primer coat. Get the proper equipment and learn how to use it, including forced air respirator. Lots of YouTube videos to get you started. I also did prime all the rivet lines just to promote good paint adhesion. Not perfect by any means but only a few days and less than $2k all in including all the equipment/tools and paint supplies.


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How did you fix/address your surface corrosion?

[RLCarter]

@JayMatt I’m not a professional painter by no means but in high school I worked for one of the local FBO’s and stripped several aircraft while there. Over the years I have painted several custom motorcycles and I’ll throw in my $0.02, pick a system (PPG, DuPont, etc) and use their entire system, don’t mix brands unless your 100% sure they are compatible. The biggest consumer of time is the prep… any flaw only grows when painted, and should an insect decide to land on your wet paint, LEAVE IT until the paint has cured then pick it’s carcass out (trying to remove it from wet paint makes a big mess). Don’t skimp on supplies, use quality tape, masking paper, tack cloths etc… Remove as much as you can, control surfaces, fairings, inspection panels, etc…. Mask off ALL the openings created from the step above. Practice on the inspection panels as they are small and easy to start over if needed, working your way up to bigger parts..ie wings and fuselage should be last. Serval light tack coats (hardly any coverage) helps with sags and runs followed by a wet coat. Follow the recommendations for overlapping when spraying (overlapping prevents “tiger stripes”) HVLP (high volume low pressure) spray guns rock, spend the money on a good one, primers and paints should use a different needle/nozzle, a removable cup makes it nice on larger areas, have a buddy mix a new cup while your spraying, swap it out a keep painting. Use a regulator/water separator at the compressor and a small disposable separator at the gun (replace daily), drain your compressor daily before spraying. A good respirator with replaceable filters is a MUST, change those filters daily as well. Orange peel and dry spots will be your biggest issues, these are gun settings an technique for the most part, as the area being painted gets larger settings/technique changes. Edges and sharp corners tend to wick the paint away, leaving a thin coat, this can be avoided some with multiple tack coats on the edges before the wet coat. It’s been 12yrs since I’ve painted anything of value, the tread above mentioned 2 grand for tools & supplies, my guess is if you have to buy everything it would be closer to 6k. The better the prep work the better the outcome, it’s a fine line between not enough paint (dry spots) and too much paint (runs/sags), get it just right and it will flow nice and smooth (little to no orange peel) so practice, practice, practice and take pics, we like pics. So have fun and keep us posted

[Shadrach]

On 6/21/2022 at 3:07 PM, LANCECASPER said:

And don’t even think about doing it outside or you really will find out how many insects are in Galveston @JayMatt

I saw a guy painting a 201 outside at the Annapolis airport (no shortage of bugs in MD).  I asked him about bugs in the paint and he said it would not be a problem.  I asked him if he had painted an airplane before and he said he’d only painted three others but that as a professional boat painter, the several hundred boats that he’d painted before were good practice.

[A64Pilot]

Ref paint, where I worked we had serious paint issues, some of it was the booth, a lot of it was the paint, some the painters etc.

So I got to searching around to learn about paint, one thing I learned was that Air Force one, the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds all used the same paint, Sherwin Williams Jet-Glo. Surely they used the best paint available.

So we went with that and the majority of our paint problems went away. A good painter can do a very good job with cheaper paint, but it seems a very good paint applied by an average painter comes out much better. Yes the paints expensive, but our re-work dropped so much that I feel the time saved by the better paint paid for itself.

[Fly Boomer]

14 hours ago, Hector said:

2K urethane

What led you to the 2K?  I had not heard of that one before.

[LANCECASPER]

14 hours ago, Hector said:

Painted my bird myself. Not difficult to do. 2K urethane. Scuff sanded until I removed most of the topcoat, but not the primer coat. Get the proper equipment and learn how to use it, including forced air respirator. Lots of YouTube videos to get you started. I also did prime all the rivet lines just to promote good paint adhesion. Not perfect by any means but only a few days and less than $2k all in including all the equipment/tools and paint supplies.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

I used to base at Stinson (KSSF) in San Antonio. Someone decided to paint an airplane in a t-hangar. Five other airplanes in hangars, including mine, got overspray. His insurance company paid for all of our airplanes to be cleaned up. Since Texas has become much more merciful, they didn't hang him, I think he got lethal injection 

[ArtVandelay]

Painted my bird myself. Not difficult to do. 2K urethane. Scuff sanded until I removed most of the topcoat, but not the primer coat. Get the proper equipment and learn how to use it, including forced air respirator. Lots of YouTube videos to get you started. I also did prime all the rivet lines just to promote good paint adhesion. Not perfect by any means but only a few days and less than $2k all in including all the equipment/tools and paint supplies.


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Looks like you painted it with the flaps up, what happens when you lower the flaps?

Pros would remove all controls, strip, paint and rebalance as required.

[RLCarter]

1 hour ago, LANCECASPER said:

Since Texas has become much more merciful, they didn't hang him, I think he got lethal injection 

lol….. maybe with the push for renewable energy, they’ll bring back “Old Sparky” either in a Solar or Wind version 

[M20F]

4 minutes ago, RLCarter said:

lol….. maybe with the push for renewable energy, they’ll bring back “Old Sparky” either in a Solar or Wind version 

Hemp rope works better and is even greener. 

[RLCarter]

6 minutes ago, M20F said:

Hemp rope works better and is even greener. 

Years ago I needed to get fingerprinted so I called a buddy with the San Benito PD to see if he could Hook me up, SBPD had moved into their new facility which was on the edge of probably a 250 acre field of Hemp….. not sure if the farmer had a sense of humor or what, but it sure was odd seeing all that faux pot surrounding a Police Station

[Shadrach]

3 hours ago, ArtVandelay said:

Looks like you painted it with the flaps up, what happens when you lower the flaps?

Pros would remove all controls, strip, paint and rebalance as required.

I always had the impression that Hector was an IA. Maybe there’s more to the story than the images show.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, ArtVandelay said:

Looks like you painted it with the flaps up, what happens when you lower the flaps?

Pros would remove all controls, strip, paint and rebalance as required.

Perhaps the controls were painted earlier?  Who knows.

Clarence

[Pinecone]

On 7/6/2022 at 11:47 AM, RLCarter said:

 A good respirator with replaceable filters is a MUST, change those filters daily as well. 

The breakthrough time with standard paint cartridges is about 30 seconds.  Use supplied air.

[jetdriven]

20 hours ago, Shadrach said:

I saw a guy painting a 201 outside at the Annapolis airport (no shortage of bugs in MD).  I asked him about bugs in the paint and he said it would not be a problem.  I asked him if he had painted an airplane before and he said he’d only painted three others but that as a professional boat painter, the several hundred boats that he’d painted before were good practice.

Dang was a blue and white 201?  Because I did a pre-buy on one over there and it looks like it was painted outside and it was not in the logbook and the owner owned a boat painting business. What a coincidence. Some unfortunate guy that I’ve seen on the Facebook DC pilots group bought this plane 

[Hector]

I used to base at Stinson (KSSF) in San Antonio. Someone decided to paint an airplane in a t-hangar. Five other airplanes in hangars, including mine, got overspray. His insurance company paid for all of our airplanes to be cleaned up. Since Texas has become much more merciful, they didn't hang him, I think he got lethal injection 

I went to great lengths to make sure that didn’t happen. Plastic sheeting on floor, walls, and ceiling. Large industrial fan with a filter pulling paint overspray out the front.


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[Hector]

I always had the impression that Hector was an IA. Maybe there’s more to the story than the images show.

Not an IA, just an aero engineer (strength/fatigue). Flaps were down when painted. Did not paint the ailerons. Yes, pros would have done other things I did not but it would have cost $15k more. I’m pretty happy with the results.


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[Hector]

[mention=48973]JayMatt[/mention] I’m not a professional painter by no means but in high school I worked for one of the local FBO’s and stripped several aircraft while there. Over the years I have painted several custom motorcycles and I’ll throw in my $0.02, pick a system (PPG, DuPont, etc) and use their entire system, don’t mix brands unless your 100% sure they are compatible. The biggest consumer of time is the prep… any flaw only grows when painted, and should an insect decide to land on your wet paint, LEAVE IT until the paint has cured then pick it’s carcass out (trying to remove it from wet paint makes a big mess). Don’t skimp on supplies, use quality tape, masking paper, tack cloths etc… Remove as much as you can, control surfaces, fairings, inspection panels, etc…. Mask off ALL the openings created from the step above. Practice on the inspection panels as they are small and easy to start over if needed, working your way up to bigger parts..ie wings and fuselage should be last. Serval light tack coats (hardly any coverage) helps with sags and runs followed by a wet coat. Follow the recommendations for overlapping when spraying (overlapping prevents “tiger stripes”) HVLP (high volume low pressure) spray guns rock, spend the money on a good one, primers and paints should use a different needle/nozzle, a removable cup makes it nice on larger areas, have a buddy mix a new cup while your spraying, swap it out a keep painting. Use a regulator/water separator at the compressor and a small disposable separator at the gun (replace daily), drain your compressor daily before spraying. A good respirator with replaceable filters is a MUST, change those filters daily as well. Orange peel and dry spots will be your biggest issues, these are gun settings an technique for the most part, as the area being painted gets larger settings/technique changes. Edges and sharp corners tend to wick the paint away, leaving a thin coat, this can be avoided some with multiple tack coats on the edges before the wet coat. It’s been 12yrs since I’ve painted anything of value, the tread above mentioned 2 grand for tools & supplies, my guess is if you have to buy everything it would be closer to 6k. The better the prep work the better the outcome, it’s a fine line between not enough paint (dry spots) and too much paint (runs/sags), get it just right and it will flow nice and smooth (little to no orange peel) so practice, practice, practice and take pics, we like pics. So have fun and keep us posted

Yes, all of the above! I did have to change the desiccant beads in the compressor more often. Just keep an eye on that to make sure you don’t get moisture in your paint. Prep is by far the biggest time consumer. Must ensure surface is absolutely clean and free of any oil or wax before painting. I cleaned the surfaces twice with Smart Wax and Grease Remover before painting. Failure to get everything absolutely clean will result in orange peel. Equipment cost was for just the paint guns (I used separate paint guns for paint and primer), paint supplies, forced air respirator I bought on eBay. Everything else I already had including large compressor with water separator and desiccant cartridge.


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[Shadrach]

13 hours ago, jetdriven said:

Dang was a blue and white 201?  Because I did a pre-buy on one over there and it looks like it was painted outside and it was not in the logbook and the owner owned a boat painting business. What a coincidence. Some unfortunate guy that I’ve seen on the Facebook DC pilots group bought this plane 

Nope. He was laying down burgundy paint. Probably painted by the same guy though. How many pilot/boat painter/shade tree airplane painters can there be at KANP?

 

looking at the pics, the defects look more like they were more about lousy prep than outdoor painting.

[RLCarter]

6 hours ago, Shadrach said:

Nope. He was laying down burgundy paint. Probably painted by the same guy though. How many pilot/boat painter/shade tree airplane painters can there be at KANP?

 

looking at the pics, the defects look more like they were more about lousy prep than outdoor painting.

That and it looks way too thick to me. Regardless of how good/smooth it looks, thick paint chips off really easy

[LANCECASPER]

35 minutes ago, RLCarter said:

That and it looks way too thick to me. Regardless of how good/smooth it looks, thick paint chips off really easy

It looks like an Earl Scheib paint job where they do they windows, chrome bumpers and rubber trim at no extra charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Scheib

[Mcstealth]

On 6/21/2022 at 10:09 PM, cliffy said:

You'll need jacks to paint the bottom easily (easier?)

More better?