For the last week or two I’ve been doing a lot of body work and prepping for painting. Just refilling some rivet holes and make sure all of the fairings are fitting correctly. Did little to no body filler but there was a place here or there that I wasn’t happy with that required some touch up. I did not have my windshield in when I was painted nor did I have any gaskets on. When I’ve painted cars in the past, removing the gaskets was standard procedure so I thought leaving the windshield off would be essentially the same thing. I also still do not have my parachute so the parachute cover was painted before installed. I think that’s a good idea that way there’s actually paint underneath the cover and should help corrosion resistance and may even help the cover to detach easier.

I provided concept drawing of what I wanted to plan to look like to my painter. His reply was, “did you have your kids draw this with crayons.”. My response was, “no I drew it. Am I really that bad of an artist”. I took the sling dimensions from the poh and printed it out on a full size sheet of paper and colored it in. We then take off the entire plane and got the painting. We painted it in my shop and it took 3 days and made one hell of a mess. I had four fans with air filters attached going and it still wasn’t enough. So we’d have to take breaks painting occasionally to let the air clear out.

But it’s done now and I think the end result is well worth the effort.

I feel like I need to be further back to take to take a decent picture. So I will save most of the finished product pictures until later.