Finally the weather gods smiled on us and dropped the humidity below 70% so we could spray the top coat on. I’m using the royal plural here since Laurie did all the spraying, all I could contribute was mixing the 2 pack polyurethane and wiping down the plane with acetone. And a great job he did! Unfortunately we just ran short of paint for the last little bit at the bottm of the tail, so I’ll get another litre to finish the job and which will also be used to fix up a few minor blemishes due to spattering from the spray gun.

As Laurie is going to NZ next week this will have to wait until after Easter. By then the paint will have had enough time to cure so we can do a bit of cutting back of a few runs etc..

The picture doesn’t do the paint job justice, it really looks great.

It feels like we achieved a significant milestone. The coating of the fuselage was in fact the main task from the beginning of this project.

Laurie arrived with a bottle of red in hand, but the consumption will have to wait until he gets back from NZ. We had a steak dinner at the Bonnells Bay pub instead, washed down with a glass of red.

Last week we sandblasted the metal fittings to remove surface rust . Laurie fabricated a blast box for this job. It worked really well after taping the gaps in the box to stop sand dust coming out.

We’re happy with the results, much better than trying to remove the rust by other means. The fittings are now ready for a protective paint coat. We’ll probably use the white 2 pack polyurethane.

Another little job is the cleaning up of the wing root hatches. They had quite a bit of crud in the latches which needed cleaning off.

They will also receive a coat of white polyurethane.