Gotta love painting :)

[kitfoxvixen9095]

I don't beleive in bad luck but it's funny the timing sometimes. While putting the final coat of white on my fuse I was thinking to myself how amazingly clean my paintjob was for a garage job, then it happened. 3 huge hunks of crap came out of the gun and right into the side of the fuse. I was literally 90% done with the final coat!!

As i said, you gotta love painting!!

[jonbakerok]

Ugg... I feel your pain!

I'm about to start painting myself and it's the one part of this project that I really dread. I'm hopeless with a spray gun.

I'm using Stewarts System and I was on their website looking at paint chips when I ran across instructions for applying their polyurethane top coat with a PAINT ROLLER! Talk about lowering the bar! And think how much less $350/gallon paint you'd have to buy!

Has anyone actually tried it? I'm really tempted.

[HansLab]

I spoke to a guy that rolled on paint onto a glider once: the plane is near my own fflying club and I've seen a beautiful plane!! I read of rolling PolyBrush as well (dunno about Steward), but the Dutch PB-retailer thought it might not be a too good idea, for the paint tends to froth (if that is the right word for it: it makes small bubbles, which tend to dry quicker than the rest of the paint).
I too like to see somebody give some experiences about this one: I'm not going to spray, but rolling can be done within my garage
looking forward!!

HL

[Andrew G]

Warning: my advice on this forum has been, at best, useless thus far:

I built a boat, and I painted it myself. I learned a lot by making mistakes from a roller perspective, but the very best paint roller I used in terms of 1) smoothness and 2) flexibility (hard to cut places, etc.)

... is the 4" white foam paint roller...

I found one posted here at Jamestown Distributors, which is the Aircraft Spruce of the boat world, but I've found them in Home Depot too...

http://www.jamestowndistributors.com/userportal/show_product.do?pid=2578

Also, don't press too hard on the foam rollers as sometimes they come apart and "foam dirt" screws up your expensive paint job.

Good luck.

[sdemeyer]

I painted my Kitfox wing with a roller after I recovered it. I used exterior house paint matched to the same color as the rest of the plane, with a little floetrol added in. The paint looks as good or better than the original polytone paint on the rest of the plane. The floetrol eliminated all roller marks.


Scott

[jonbakerok]

Here's the response I got from Doug Stewart:

Hi Jon,

We have folks that only roll on the paint and they are very happy with the
results. They have told us that the finish is not quite as good as from a
spray gun but it is good enough that rolling is all they will do. We also
just received a picture of a Murphy from the UK that was painted with foam
brushes and it looks very nice. We will have a write up from that builder
detailing the process he used to get very nice results with the foam
brushes.

Down side is the finish is probably not going to be quite as nice as a
sprayed finish. That could probably be taken care of by wet sanding the
finish with 2000 paper and then buffing to a high gloss.

Sincerely,
Doug Stewart