Painting Day 1

I had planned to start painting yesterday but a friend called with an engine problem and that ate up the morning. When I got to the airport, his plane was running at idle, it was clear from the sound he had a stuck valve. This is not a big deal on the larger continentals but is a royal pain on a 65. The valve stem and the guide are the same size so you have to work through the spark plug hole to reinsert the valve. On the 85 and up the valve necks down and you can tie a loop of wire around it to pull the valve back into the guide. I also did not have the correct (11/32) reamer to ream the guide, so I had to differ to the local shop.
   I spent the rest of Sunday scrubbing all the fairings clean with Stits 310 cleaner and then etching them with some phosphoric acid wash . I also had to add a couple more nut plates that I had completely forgotten. After being hot an wet for several hours I decided to bag it for the day.
  Today I started by getting the shop and all the parts ready for painting. I have found that successful painting is 90% preparation and 10% application. First I got everything laid out on the painting screen. 

The fairing strips will be mostly painted from above so they are just laying on the screen. I am painting the back side first, that way if they stick to the screen when flipped over it won't be a big deal. The leading edge fairing are tied to the screen with safety wire otherwise they would blow away with the HVLP gun.

The aileron control bushings are on the rod. The muffler shroud I installed on a length of 2x4 so it could be rotated for painting.

The tail pipe shroud got a similar treatment you can see where Dawley went after it with the welder. I don't think it will look as bad when painted black. It sure does not have any holes in it!

I started by priming all the back sides using Stits off white epoxy primer.

I let this dry about 1 hour then turned the leading edge pieces around , flipped all the strips and painted the front side with two coats.

Then I painted the muffler shrouds and a couple other small parts that I did not get in the photos.

What looks like a run is actually a run in the braze filler, I wish I could braze this nice or weld aluminum like this guy.

I hope to shoot the white enamel on the wing fairings tomorrow , however the weather man is calling for worse thunderstorms tomorrow. It thundered all afternoon today but they all passed south to north just to the west. I will paint the black on Wednesday. The cowl will wait until Thursday because I ran low on primer.