Painting Day!

Laurie picked up Pete’s spray gun as we had been unable to obtain a 1.5 mm nozzle for Laurie’s gun. Thanks Pete!

When we started setting up, I hunted around the shed for the gun I had used all those years ago for the Aventura seaplane wings. Guess what: my gun is EXACTLY identical to the one Pete loaned us, same brand, same 1.5 mm nozzle! As mine was actually a bit shinier (I had preserved it in a plastic bag after cleaning it out), Laurie elected to use it.

Following a trip to Bunnings to get enough drop sheets to wrap up the Harbour Bridge, we then cleaned out the spray gun with thinners, checked the air compressor and set the pressure for 60 psi as recommended by Norglass. By 11 o’clock the humidity had dropped below 75 % and painting could commence.

After testing the gun settings on a bit of cardboard, the low side of the horizontal stabiliser became the first “for real” candidate to be coated with Norglass White High Sheen 2-pack polyurethane. The first few shots caused a bit of consternation as the gun “stuttered”. However, this cleared after a few seconds and the rest went smoothly.

Laurie has quite a lot of spray painting experence, and that showed soon enough – the result was excellent, very little orange peel, indicating that he had thinned the polyurethane mix just right, about 25% of Norglass thinner. Laurie applied a light dust coat and two full wet coats to achieve a really superb result.

After the (paint) dust had settled, I calculated the coverage. We used exactly 0.5 litres for an actual area of 2.2 m2, for 3 coats = 6.6 m2, so coverage is 13.2 m2 per litre.

Translating this to the estimated area of the fuselage, we realised that the 2 litres we had left was going to be insufficient so I ordered another litre from Inspiration Paints at Warners Bay. The 3 litres will then give us a theoretical coverage of about 40 m2. As we estimate the fuselage area at 15 m2, this would get us about 2.66 coats. Hopefully with the larger area of the fuselage, there will be significantly less overspray than with the narrow horizontal stabiliser and Laurie should be able to apply 3 coats. He is confident that he will. Pete told us that they only used 2 litres for 2 light coats on their Bocian. Time will tell!

I received the nut plates for the luggage deck and hope to find some time to advance that part of the restoration. Laurie has lent me his router table which I will use to recess the frames for the nut plates so that the plywood deck will sit flush on the frames.