(Excerpts from D'Hawk's May, 1996 column)

I guess I'll never learn to love painting, but I have absolutely "whatever-Koted" my last pattern plane. The films are fine for combat planes and sport planes but I just hate them on my "prize" ships. After the initial torture of applying a good paint finish they are virtually maintenance free and will look good for many years.
My plan was to get the Legend ready to paint as quickly as possible, so that both it and my Typhoon "D" could go under the gun at the same time. (The Typhoon was ready to paint late last fall but my garage is not heated, so it was waiting for suitable - or at least tolerable - painting weather).
One thing that helped hurry along the Legend was that I tried a new epoxy for glassing the wings and stab. The Aerospace Composites Products' EZ-Lam epoxy is excellent stuff for this. I thinned it about 20 percent for the first coat and it brushed through the .58 oz. like water, but "stuck" well enough to keep the cloth in position. I used the 60-minute variety, which gave plenty of time to get both wings done with one batch (on one side, of course). After the first coat is on and the edges are sanded off, a second, un-thinned coat is brushed on. Neither coat is "squeegeed" off, it's thin enough and slow enough to flow out on its own. I only use the two coats, which is probably the lightest way to go but means you'll spend some time filling in spots later on. I'm going to try some samples and see how much weight a third coat adds, because that would completely fill the weave and save a lot of spot-filler time.
Anyhow, this epoxy is the easiest-sanding epoxy I've ever used. It's actually almost too easy to sand, you can remove too much if you don't pay attention. I really like this epoxy and will use it on my next plane. ACP advertises in the magazines and Central Hobbies usually has it in stock.

Now, the reason for wanting to paint two planes at once was that I was sure that it would be much more efficient than repeating all of the mixing, cleaning the garage, setting the paint patterns and flows, cleaning equipment and so on. But I also wanted to be able to paint ALL sides at one time, which I haven't done before because I had no fixtures to enable this. This way I could mix paint, get the equipment working and then spray ALL of that color and be done with it. Had I painted as in the past, this would be FOUR operations; one operation for each side of each airplane. So the efficiency would be hugely increased. All I had to do was figure out how to accomplish my grand plan.

Back to my problem - how to paint all sides of two planes at one setting. I knew I needed a stand, and that it had to accommodate two fuselages at the same time. It also had to allow me to rotate the fuselages (longitudinally) so I could get the paint on all sides of the fuselage. For strictly personal reasons it also had to be cheap, and needed to be easy to set-up and put away because we kind of like to keep our vehicles in my painting booth.... er, garage.
So, a trip to the hardware store was called for. I had a very good idea what I wanted, and then ended up buying nothing of the sort because I figured out a much better device while looking around the store. My big breakthrough was realizing that the biggest part of the paint stand problem was the stability of the base. You certainly don't want the thing to tip over with two freshly painted fuselages hanging off it! But building a stable, portable base capable of holding two seven-foot fuselages meant either a very heavily weighted base or a very large base. Weight was not great for portability, and size gets in the way. There just had to be something I was missing.
Then it hit me. (thud!) Hell, I had a very stable base all ready for use; the garage! The problem was that I was looking at what already had been done by others, and not at how to best solve the problem at hand. Forget the base-supporting a stand routine. Just HANG the stand from the rafters! No extra weight, nothing in the way underneath or around the planes, and when done painting I can just swing the thing up into the rafters and leave it there. I can't believe it took so long to figure this out.
So, back to the hardware store. A 4-foot chunk of thick walled, 2-inch PVC pipe, a 2: "T" fitting, two 2" to 1" adapters, some galvanized pipe nipples, a couple of flanges (for the firewall) and two 1" pipe unions, a couple of bolts and "bingo," I have my paint stand! Less than $30 total, not counting the garage of course.

Hopefully I got some art done here that explains this better. It worked GREAT! A single operation to put each color on all sides of two airplanes. I estimate about 40 hours time saved on this job, or about 20 hours (minimum) saved compared to having to repeat every operation twice for each color on just one plane. Oh, I almost forgot - the wings were easy. I just bought dowels to fit into the wing sockets, then wrapped masking tape around them for a slightly tight slip-fit. Drill holes for the dowels in a sawhorse or whatever and again make a tight slip fit or bolt that end in place. The wing can be rotated around the dowel to allow both sides to be painted in one operation.
The one other new (to me) thing that I did was to buy some 3M masking paper. It comes on a roll of about 100 feet and is available in various widths. It's a thin paper that's treated with a wax-like substance on the inside, so it holds out the paint exceptionally well. The outside is not coated, so it holds the masking tape. Much faster and easier than using old newspapers, etc. Well worth the moderate cost.
(You can see a pix of the painted Legend in the D'Best Co. Gallery at this web site)

"Do It" with Precision!
D'Hawk

(Speaking of the Legend wow! This Greg Marsden design, kitted by his fellow Canadian Henry Piorun, is a real looker. And my decision to pay Henry a little extra for the "standard pre-built" version was the smartest thing I've done since back in 1978 when I decided maybe I should look into those "computer things." I just can't say enough good things about my experience with Henry. The kit is flawless, the fit is perfect and his woodworking is better than anything I've produced. The extra $400 (above the kit price) gets you wings and stabs that are fully sheeted with leading edges and tips completely finished, control surfaces cut out and beveled for hinging, gear plates, wheel wells and servo boxes are installed and the whole thing is ready for finish sanding and covering. The fuse is very light, very well made and one "smearing" of Violett pinhole filler had it ready for priming. The canopy and belly pan are both perfectly fitted. Henry even scrapes the lap-seams for you - mine needed about 20 minutes of 320-grit and a few dabs of filler to be perfect.
If you subtract the $150 you would spend yourself on wood and glue, this is a hell of a lot of high quality labor for $250 extra! I actually think it's the best price around on highly skilled building. (No, he does NOT build other manufacturers kits). Henry is a perfectionist and does most of the work himself, so production is limited and availability on the pre-builts is usually 2-4 months depending on the backlog. If you can live with that, then you have my strongest personal recommendations to try one of his offerings. My next plane will probably be one of his new "Olympian" kits, it's another real looker with very similar moments and numbers (compared to the Legend) and I'm a sucker for clear canopies. )



Precision Aerobatics