Today I did my first top coat with Stewarts Systems paint on my fuselage. All in all, I like the paint and the way it went on. there are a lot of things I have learned as I go through the painting process and I'll share some here. First, I discovered that painting a fuselage with a large gun (Devilbiss Finishline 4) is difficult at best to get to all the nooks and crannies in a fuselage. The Stewarts system top coats go on first with a light, fast fog coat through color saturation followed by a wetter top coat. While this will likely be pretty easy on a wing or fuselage, it was difficult on the fuselage. It is nearly impossible to maintain the proper distances of 10-12" for the fog coat and 6-8" for the wet coat; the gun just gets in the way. I have been watching the Stewarts videos and they are very helpful and easy to follow. My only suggestion is a video on shooting primer and color on a tube fuselage. This is way different than a flat surface like a wing. I called Stewarts today to ask about the amount of paint I would need to mix to top coat the fuselage, they asked what type of gun. When I told them what I had, they said they usually shoot a fuselage with a small, $50 touch up gun to avoid over spray, wasting material. That little tip may be obvious to those of you who have shot a fuselage before but not to me. So, I used the big gun, set for a small pattern as they told me on the phone and it worked well. I also had to shoot outside as I don't have a spray booth yet. For the wings and fuselage fabric I'll be shooting in a spray booth built from a Costco Carport tent. The booth will be outside my shop but have fans, lights, etc so should work pretty good. I did have some orange peal but no runs, no matter what angle I shot with the gun. For the color wet coat, I opened up the material a bit more and moved the gun more slowly to allow the gloss to come up just after I passed over an area; just as the video instructed. The finish on the larger , flat areas like the door frames have a nice, high gloss finish and should be good. there are some places on the fuselage where the finish is more flat as I did not get a good wet coat due to issues of getting the gun in a good position. I suppose that a smaller touch-up gun would have made that step easier. A quick look over the fuselage tonight shows some areas where I can see that the top coat is thin but those areas will be covered by the fabric, interior panels, etc. This being my first build leaves me at a disadvantage as I don't have experience in what will actually be seen or not. I may do some re-painting in a couple days if there are any areas where I am concerned. It seems that there really is very little on a fuselage that is visible when covered. I will be doing some fabric work inside the fuselage so any visible areas can be addressed at that time.
So my overall impression of the Stewarts system so far is very good. We'll see if there are any areas I missed and address those with some more paint. As to quantity of paint used; I used about 20 oz of color so far. I will need to purchase more for the other parts so a gallon is in order. My color's are Sun Valley Ivory with Evergreen trim. I'm going for a more traditional Piper look that was from the factory for the PA12's and 14's.
Any questions or comments on the Stewarts paints, let them fly. This is all about learning.
Marty57