This post covers the last couple days.  And while much better, my man cold continues to linger slightly.

That being said, the combat painting continues!

I started off by popping the new-edged aft nose cover off the taped-up canard.  Here you can see the rough, cured flocro’d edges of the cover that meet up with the canard top.

I then dove in and painted the canard with the Nason white paint that I have on hand.  It’s a really good quality paint, I’m just not a good quality painter! ha.

The bottom of the canard (of course) came out better than the top, with significantly less orange peel across the board.  The right side canard isn’t too bad, but the left top is by far the worst regarding orange peel (yes, I choose to dwell on the negatives!).

One last shot at the canard in white paint.  Not perfect, but as far as combat painting, this dog will hunt!

I also knocked out both sides of the elevators and the ailerons in white paint, one side per day.

And of course we have the “test subjects,” which I actually shot first with white paint.  Not bad, but also replete with a good bit of the dreaded orange peel here and there.

At the end of day 2 I was ready to finally get the aft nose/avionics cover slathered up in gray primer… a big milestone, if not at least in my mind.

I also got the top cowling in gray primer as well.  I had epoxy wiped the exposed micro to ensure no (extra) pin holes appeared.  That seemed to do the trick as far as the micro’d areas, but the carbon fiber itself doesn’t seal perfectly when epoxy wiped so I have a good number of pin holes to fill with the Icing.

I also hit the left side strake hatch door with gray primer to begin its journey of someday getting painted as well.

I had some extra gray paint in the gun so I quickly finished sanding down and cleaning up the bottom cowling, then hit it with a solid coat of gray epoxy primer.

I’ll note that I’ll spend a day or two cleaning up all the above gray epoxy primered components, but I’ve decided that for time’s sake I’m going to press forward towards first flight with the cowlings in gray primer and the wings, fuselage and strakes in white primer.  Painting is taking too much time for the quality I’m getting not having a paint booth… I need to figure that one out.

So I guess when I say “combat painting” from here on out, I actually mean “combat priming!” . . .  still, pressing forward.