The weather has finally made up its mind to start making its way towards to the warm side. Its been a little frustrating the last month. One day it will 40 and sunny, a nice day to brake out the motorcycle. But beware... the next day there will be 2 inches of snow. During the summer month's Im on either my motorcycle or bicycle. Fuel gets way to expensive to warrant the use of the truck. So Im ready for those nice sunny days.
At school we have made good progress on the 185 project. We are almost 75% with the paint. We have learned tons from this project, Much more than we could learn from just reading the information from a book. The four of us in the maintenance specialist class are doing all the work. The planning, ordering of parts and materials, an actually driving the rivets and spraying the paint. Its been daunting at times but in the end we will be able to stand back and say, "yes, we did that".
We are borrowing a different shops paint facility to spray in. It would be impossible to get a good finish if we tried to spray out side or in an empty hangar. The only downside is that the area is a little cramped. We have to be creative to be able to get all the parts moved around in between spray batches.
The paint we are using is a two part polyurethane by Jetglow. Its a really nice product. It took us a little while to figure it out. It shoots allot different that the single stage automotive products that I was used to. for instants the primer is supposed to go on so thin that you can still see through it.
The paint goes on in two coats and we where able to get a really good shine.
After the white cures for a few days we are able to tape it of and spray the red. The end product came out really well. Red is the hardest color to get right. We actually ended up spraying three coats of red to finally get the nice deep finish we where looking for.
These fresh colors are really going to make this bird shine.
Coming soon... Spraying the fuselage
To see some of the project up to this point look at the pages in the side bar...