Today was the day to finally get the fuselage, strakes and nose in white paint. As par usual my target mid-morning paint shoot ended up occurring late afternoon.

One major difference in shooting this round of paint was that I used the Spectrum paint cup system, which allows for shooting upside down/inverted without spilling paint everywhere.  I shot both a sealer coat on the sanded yet remaining boat paint primer on the bottom of the strakes before then shooting the white paint.

I also shot a seal coat wherever I had done filler work or previous 2K primer, and of course along the lower nose strip of previous white boat paint primer.

Although it doesn’t look much different in these pics due to the gray cloud cover we had today (but no rain thankfully), the fuselage, strakes and nose are painted white.

But . . . there’s rarely a free lunch, and for some reason the left sidewall seam between new primer and old primer, although I sanded it smooth both visually and by feel (or so I thought), was showing through the paint.  I contemplated leaving it since the paint was all on nicely, but then having to fix it got the better of me.

AND… things would have been fine, but I shot just a hair too much on wanting to ensure a wet glossy reshoot on this forward sidewall/nose area, and I got two ~5″ long sags just under the seam I was trying to “fill” with a good extra couple coats of paint.  My fault and stupid mistake, I should have been more controlled and patient in my painting.  Now I have 2 runs to contend with…

And the seam is still very slightly visible, but significantly less so. Clearly the added slathering of paint worked, but at a cost.  I’ll revert back to my “combat painting” moniker of this phase, which to be clear isn’t my desire, but just the reality of getting it all done ASAP.

Another shot of the painted fuselage.  You may note the dew on the strakes after just putting the bird in the shop, since now at mid-evening (7’ish) all outside composite components (e.g. wings) start dewing up quite significantly, while my vehicles, boat, etc. are all bone dry.  Very odd.

Here we have the RAM air scoop painted blue.  Not perfect since I have some required touchup spots since I taped off the inside opening and the NACA scoop.  But passable and flyable (probably for years… we’ll see!).

I also taped off and shot the center of the top cowling blue . . .

As well as the same for the aft nose/avionics cover… (this may get sanded and reshot due to the insane amount of bug Kamikaze attacks for some reason on this part).

Still pressing forward.