Painting, boom dolly, main cart

[dickoreilly]

My airport, Brian Ranch in Llano, CA, was designed and built as an ultralight airport. Hence most of the hangars are only 20-feet wide. Most of us rent half a hangar, sharing with whomever rents the other half. The senior occupant gets the outside spot. I have to move the other plane, a Hurricane, before I can get my plane out, and vice versa when I'm done. The tradeoff for being at the rear of the hangar is that I get all that wall space for storage area.

Most of our planes have wingspans greater than 20 feet, so we put them on carts or dollies and move them in and out of hangars sideways.

In my photos you'll see several views of my Thunder Gull ready to roll. The mains sit between two rails made of 1 1/2-inch conduit. Steel ramps allow me to pull it up onto the cart or push it off. A friend who owns a custom car fabrication shop made it for me. The tail boom sits in a simple wooden dolly I made of birch plywood. Four swiveling casters allow it to move as needed.

The plane was finished in Poly Fiber's Insignia White Poly Tone paint when I bought it. I decided to add trim using Yellow-Orange Poly Tone. As you can see I built a wooden rack for my main cart to hold the wing for painting. With the wing off, I didn't need that cart to move the fuselage.

In photo "3-First Coat" you can see a dark area on the vertical stabilizer. That's where I tried to move masking tape to change the original trim paint pattern I planned. The blue tape pulled the paint off the stabilizer. I couldn't feather the edge, so I ended up stripping all the paint off that aluminum sheet, which is how the plane remained for some months after I finished all the other painting.

Eventually I followed Poly Fiber's recommendaton and primed the bare metal with their two-part epoxy primer. After it cured for a couple weeks I was easily able to paint it with the color coat. Poly Tone is a semi-gloss finish, although it can be polished out to some degree. I like the look and don't plan to polish it.

I sprayed with an $80 Harbor Freight High Volume Low Pressure sprayer, which sort of looks like a tank vacuum cleaner, complete with 15' corrugated hose through which the air runs from the turbine to the gun. It is a great tool with all brass nozzles and needles. I used the smallest (of three) nozzles and adjusted the needle to open only about 1/8 inch to get the right spray for the very thin paint.

The paint scheme was designed by my brother, a commercial artist. I sent him as many photos of Gulls as I could find on the web. He sent me back renditions of many different patterns and colors. I like this one because it makes the plane very visible, yet it is simple to mask and spray.

Dick

[fgayford]

Richard
That dolly system is way cool and clever.
Its good to share these things so those who need something like our dollys don't have to re invent the wheel so to speak.
Fred