Portlandflyer

This is what a toy airplane bipe factory looks like. Just waiting for paint.

Portlandflyer

This is what the surface looks like after working on the primer a bit more. It's actually thinner than it looks. The light areas still have primer on them.

Portlandflyer

A few other thoughts. One thing to consider is contacting a local sign company to see if they will cut your paint mask for you. This could save a few bucks in not having to buy a cutter. You may have to supply them the masking film. With a purchase of Corel Draw (or a free drawing program) you can do the layout and supply them the file....kind of like going to a local printer with your file. Personally, I think it's worth a few bucks to buy a machine as you can adjust on the fly. I have cut mask and found they didn't work right, made a small adjustment and back to painting.

One of the other things that's so great about vector files is the ability to rework them very quickly. When you edit a vector file, you work with what are called "nodes". Nodes are just spots along the outline (path) that you can manipulate to make instant adjustments to your image. Again, this stuff seems daunting at first, but can be learned in short order.

Here is a for-instance. If you attended the U.S. or the Cajun NATS you may have seen Mike Harrisons new Encore. Mike wanted me to do Cool Power and Futaba mask for him. I had to build the Cool Power image which just took a few minutes grabbing it as a JPG and converting it to a vector file. I already had a Futaba logo made up, but mine said Team Futaba and it wouldn't fit right on his plane. It literally took a minute or two (Mike it really took about 8 hours to do) to drop out the Team portion, rework the "F" and send it to the cutter.

OK, boys...just got notification my paint will be in next Monday!

Until then, start firing questions or thoughts at me until I can get on to painting. All four of you!

slampert

My Feedback: (7)

Matt, Thanks for outlining this technique. As both you and Patrick suggest, some testing will definitely be necessary in order to grasp the subtlety of some of these steps.

I don't think I have any of the materials on hand to even get started, so I appreciate the links to source everything. I'll let you know how I progress...

slampert

My Feedback: (7)

Gee Patrick, I don't see any room for the new Xarletoo ! Better have Pascal ship it down to LA until you cycle thru some inventory....

Portlandflyer

I already did, I already did! There's always room for one more pattern plane!

MTK

Steve, NP, glad I can help. It's not difficult but tends to be tedious. Requires a very light touch; the light silkspan can be tricky. Don't get it soaked, just lightly damp.

Pat, yes always room for one more. I have the new set of wings for my Delta to the base yellow stage. Just trim and clear coat left. Delta has its original foam cored wings but these are too thin and I didn't like the way the plane flew. The new wing is built from sticks; each panel at this point of finish weighs 280 grams. My goal was 300 per panel ready for servo, linkage and adjuster and I think it's within reach.

Malcolm H

Pat and Matt,

As others have said there are a lot more of us watching in admiration than contributing!

One small point, for those of us in other parts of the world (I'm in Scotland) it would be useful if you could attach the generic name for some of the products you are using because the brand names don't mean a lot outside the US. In particular the paints, paper bedding liquids and fillers are a bit of a mystery to me. For example what is Min Wax?

Thanks,

Malcolm

MTK

Malcolm,

Pat's finishing work is astounding. No one else in the States does the flowing and blending of colors as Pat does and is gracious enough to share as Pat is, that I've seen and I've been around for awhile. A real artist.....

Here's a short list of more info re: some of the terminology used.
Min Wax is a trade name for the polymeric resins we use. It may be purchased in a water based resin, such as the acrylic that Pat used or oil based that I and a few others used. There are advantages to each type: water based of course is diluted with water and has almost no odor. It is safer to use. The oil based is diluted by paint thinner or mineral spirits or VM and P naphtha. There's some odor with this but still is fairly safe. Another trade name that can be used is Varathane; similar resins. Buy these materials are a local home improvement store.

Dopes are the old familiar resins we used when we were kids. I use and prefer nitrate for bedding the various papers. I buy Randolph's nitrate and thinner, usually the non-tautening type but for fully sheeted surfaces, the tautening does not bother the surfaces. One should use a face mask with this material with appropriate inserts to remove the organic volatiles from the breathed air. I buy mine from Aircraft Spruce and Specialty but any aircraft supply house should have the material. Oh one other thing, there is also butyrate dope available but I don't use butyrate. This type of dope continues giving off vapors for a long time and has been known to lift top coats off a surface. Use butyrate on top of any stable surface such as nitrate or epoxy, but do not use anything other than butyrate on top unless the butyrate is adequately aged for several months.

Silkspan is a paper (wood pulp) product. It comes in 3 weights/thicknesses. For our purposes, medium has many qualities we want and has fairly good wet strength. It blends easily to itself at overlapped seams. Light is about half the weight of medium and fills much faster than medium (less coats needed) finishing out at a considerably lighter end weight, but is finicky stuff and tedious to handle. Application is as we have written in earlier pages and in other threads. Brodak in the States is one source. You would have to hunt for it in the UK.
The weight build up I get when bedding light silkspan with nitrate to the primer stage is about 1/3-1/2 gram per 100 square inches. Medium silkspan is ready for primer at about 1- 1 1/3 grams per 100 square inches

Esaki Japanese tissue also comes in three weights/thicknesses. Sig and Brodak in the States are easy to find sources. Sig sells it cheap at 2$ per sheet. Other sources found on the internet are much more expensive. Esaki is a much tougher paper than silkspan being made from rice husks. It has terrific wet strength. You'd want to butt seam this material since overlapping usually results in a ridge. It also has a lot of strength and medium grade is all that's needed for our purposes. Light grade is finicky to work with and is not as light as silkspan light. It has a rather tight structure and you have to use lots of care when bedding it otherwise it will lift. Surface prep is most important with Esaki as it must have enough dope applied before attempting to bed the paper. The weight build up I get with Esaki is similar to silkspan, grade for grade.

Klass Kote epoxy systems are two part paints similar to the old K&B we used 30years ago. Sold in the States by Diversified Solutions. I don't know if any other type of epoxy paint available in the UK will work. You would need to experiment. Usually these resins are thinned at least 2:1 for our purposes. Special thinner is required and a face mask should be used. Also once mixed, it should be allowed at least one hour induction time to initiate the cure. But that true with most two part paints, urethanes and acrylics alike. The paint is ready for handling and masking and finishing in a few hours but takes quite awhile to fully cure (a month or more). It cures into a hard shell just like any epoxy would.

Pat please add as necessary.....

Portlandflyer

Matt,

I couldn't have said it better. Excellent...thank you. I do believe the Min Wax product is available in other countries. I know it is available in Australia.

http://www.minwax.com/?jt=1&jap=1t1&...FQ9afgodXnQJPQ

The main reason I use it is lack of odor being water based, but you can bed the silkspan with many different products, dope being the most common. I don't have many brain cells left, so I can't afford to have many more die off!

Here is the Min Wax product:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Minwax-1-...3444/202061476

I hear guys are having good results with the Varathane brand as well:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Varathane...041H/202057129

drac1

My Feedback: (4)

Correct Pat, I am able to get it down under. I've been following from the start, but as you are counting that would make five now.

I was tempted to paint the Xareltoo wings, but as we have discusssed before, not being sure what weight it will come out at have decided to cover. I can always paint later if there is room.

Good info here. Keep it up.

Portlandflyer

Scott,

You are the reason I was aware you could get it...of course in liters versus quarts!

It's a real toss up on the Xareltoo. When I get my next one, I am going to see if it's feasible to do it. Maybe going with the light weight stuff like Matt uses and bedding it with dope. I have been flying mine with the ultra light weight batteries from MIke at F3A Unlimited so that drops 8 oz. off of Zippy Compacts.

Yep, all five of us! OK now we are up to six...we have Malcolm.

Malcolm H

Thanks guys,
Your explanations are extremely useful, I will be following with great interest.

Malcolm

Portlandflyer

So let's go over a bit more about the masking films and the use of them.

First let's talk about using "negatives" and "positives". Lets assume we take a block of text and cut it on our plotter onto masking film. When it comes off the cutter we still have all the film intact and if we look closely, we will see the outline of the letters cut into the film. Let's now assume we remove the film from our mask that "surrounds" the letters. In other words, the film outside the letters. What we now have is just the letters still attached to the backing paper. Let's think of this as the "positive" of our image. If on the other hand we leave the portion outside the letters and remove the letters themselves, we now have the opposite or the "negative" of our image. By the way, the term for removing parts of the film is called "weeding".

So let's say we want to paint the name of our plane on the side of our fuselage. What we would most likely do is weed out the letters, leaving the outside or "negative" of our image (mask). We then apply transfer paper, which is nothing more than a low tack paper or plastic, on top of our weeded film. At this point the masking film is ready to be applied to our fuselage (after we squeegee it well to lock everything onto the transfer paper).

We now peal the paper off of the back of our mask and apply it to the side of our plane, applying pressure to get good adhesion. Now we peal off the transfer paper on top and we are now ready to paint. What you will see is the letters we are painting are exposed and the area around them is covered with film.

I will be using both positive and negative mask on this paint job.

Rudy

Hey Pat, I see House of Kolor has a line of aerosols available, do you know anything about them? Also, do you have to clear coat over their kandy colors for durability? I've used candy like a clear coat in the past with hobby paints. Good how to info and tech guide you're doing.

Portlandflyer

Hey Rudy....hope you guys had a good XMas. It's almost warm (almost) enough to fly and no rain and wind...can you believe that!

The hobby type candy's are really not a true candy.

Their aerosols are the exact same paint that I use, in fact Coast makes them up at their facility in California.

Yes you have to clear their Kandy's. HOK Kandy is a true candy which is actually a die. When you get it, it's like water and is to be mixed with a clear carrier.

MTK

Steve, for what it's worth, my built up panels for my Delta are lightly built too. I don't know how large your Evolaris wings are (I'm guessing 600 squares) but my Delta panels are 470 squares a piece. I left the ailerons in until I had the carbon tissue and the top layer of Jap tissue bedded. It's the better way to do light structures, stabilizing them to an extent. But bows can still creep into control surfaces when they are cut out. As Pat sez, you just deal with them

The carbon tissue (0.2 oz) added about 8 grams to each panel (both sides, 940 squares) and the medium Esaki Jap tissue added about 12 grams to each panel. I used nitrate dope for mine (2 coats of 50% thinned directly onto the wood to prep, and then 2 coats of 75% thinned and all thinner in some areas to bed the tissues). I expect lacquer to work similar to nitrate dope. I've not used the water based acrylic Min Wax that Pat uses to bed the tissues on wood surfaces (only on foam) so have nothing to offer on this material.

The carbon tissue adds a lot of torsional stiffness and is highly recommended for the thin Evolaris ailerons. However it is almost all holes and takes a lot of work and alot of weight to fill it. So I didn't bother to fill mine but rather simply covered the carbon with paper tissue. You should also lay down a layer of paper over the top to make filling and finishing easier. You might consider using carbon over the ailerons only and then paper over the whole wing. I think you'd be ahead weightwise in the end. And if you decide to try the light silkspan as the top covering, weight build up will be less than my 12 grams per panel. Plus it takes less work and weight to fill light silkspan, as I mentioned before.

We can discuss all the little details directly with email. I'd rather not take away from Pat's thread any more.

Portlandflyer

Matt,

Not a problem. Between the two of us, we can get these guys really confused!

Portlandflyer

So let's go over airbrushes a bit. Keep in mind airguns and airbrushes are nothing more than tools and each have their strong and weak points. Let's say we are doing a fairly large blend of one color to another on the side of a fuselage. In this case, I would never use an airbrush as it's just not the right tool. In this case, it will be very difficult to control and you will get streaking. For this type of work, I would stick to my HVLP touch up gun.

To do all the little graphic work on this build, I will use an airbrush. One thing I will tell you is airbrushes can be very intimidating when it comes time to buy one. Again they are nothing more than tools and we need to know the right kind of tool for our needs. The good news is, for this type of work, we don't need a high dollar brush. What you will find in most cases, the higher end the brush, the more it is designed for detail.

It usually comes down to "needle" size as a major criteria in brush selection. In general, the smaller (finer) the needle, the finer the detail and the higher the cost, which is not what we need. What we want to stay away from are the ultra fine needle size brushes like .18 to .23 needles. Don't get me wrong, you can do a good job with these brushes, but why pay $400 when $60 to $100 will do the job as well if not better.

One workhorse brush is the Paasche VL. I have owned two of them over the last forty odd years and they are just as good now as when they were new. I would buy the kit which comes with a couple of different needle sizes so you can match the one that works with the paint you are using. The good news is they are very inexpensive, but will do a great job. They will handle water base as well as solvent base paints.

http://www.coastairbrush.com/proddet...L_Set_Complete

Another exceptional line of brushes is Iwata. Again, there is no reason to buy one of their high dollar brushes. Most any of their brushes from the Eclipse line down will be perfect.

http://www.coastairbrush.com/products.asp?cat=32

http://www.coastairbrush.com/products.asp?cat=33

One thing to be aware of is some Iwata brushes do not ship with the internal components (packing) to be able to shoot solvent based paints, but for a few dollars, most stores will convert them for you.

All of the brushes I have talked about are what are called "double action". The difference between a double action versus single action has to do with paint delivery. With a single action when you press down on the air, paint comes out based on the setting you have made on the tip of the brush. With a double action brush, no paint comes out until you pull back on the trigger. A double action takes a little more practice to use, but is the preferred brush for our use as it gives you much better control.

Both the Paasche and Iwata brushes are available all over the world.

Portlandflyer

Alright, let's cover design and layout.

Now right off the bat, I will tell you, I am not the best design guy in the world, but I am very good at borrowing (stealing) other peoples work! If you look at my work in the previous pictures, I am not exactly a fan of the "if one color is good, twenty is better", design school. I have nothing against what has pretty much become the norm of pattern plane paint schemes of lots of colors. Personally I have a hard time working with three or four colors, versus fifteen. In my case because I am doing a lot of graphic detail, I try to keep the paint scheme pretty simple....I like to think of them as "elegant"!

I am always on the lookout for a design or concept I might be able to integrate into my work. As a for instance the Sensation bipe was giving me a hard time. I had done several sketches of schemes, but couldn't come up with the one that was "just right". In frustration I Googled, "Reno air race planes". Every year, Reno Nevada in the U.S. host a world class air race event that host planes with some of the most elegant (there's that word again) paint schemes. It wasn't twenty seconds into my search that I hit on the perfect scheme for the Sensation. The racer "Rare Bear" had the perfect lines I was looking for that I knew would fit perfect on the Sensation. I tweaked the design a bit and bang!

Portlandflyer

After the Rare Bear scheme, I got to thinking about just reversing the yellow and purple. What is interesting is just a simple reversal of colors, resulted in a totally different look.

Portlandflyer

The Evolaris scheme was by far the most frustrating I have dealt with. I must have done at least fifteen different schemes and never could get the one I wanted. The bottom line is the scheme the kit's builder " Gernot Bruckmann" had on his personal plane was the absolute "perfect" design for that plane. In frustration I just said "Uncle" and used his basic layout. You can see the fuselage is pretty much identical to Gernot's, but I made some adjustments to the wings and stabs to accommodate the "tribal" graphics" I incorporated into them.

I have found Gernot's scheme to be so flexible (and elegant), I incorporated it into a Proteus build. In fact, this build I am doing in this thread will have a variation of Gernot's scheme with an old stand by design for the wings and stabs, which, by the way, I borrowed from someone else's design! You noticed I said I "borrowed" it!

Portlandflyer

Personally I don't work with a firm plan in mind when I do a paint job. I like to stay pretty loose and let the plane (lines of the plane) tell me what will work best. I have in the past used templates to lay out my design, but don't anymore. The way I lay out designs is to just start laying out 1/8 inch tape to see how the pattern (design) flows. If it doesn't look right, I just pick the tape up and lay it back down again. What I thought originally was going to be the best layout, in almost all cases requires tweaking. The way I look at it is, "tape is temporary, paint isn't".

I find the 3M 1/8 inch tape the best for what I do. I usually use one to two rolls per plane. Again, this tape should be available in most every country.

http://www.coastairbrush.com/search....=&stype=&scat=

By the way, don't get to hung up on a design. I did what I thought was going to be a beautiful scheme on a Proteus. I had the wings and stabs done and had about half of the fuselage painted. I stopped and said to myself "this just isn't going to work". I literally had to sand off and white out the fuselage and start all over with a totally different scheme. Not wanting to start all over on the wings and stabs, I worked backwards, coming up with a fuselage that would work with the wings. In about a day I was back up and running with a better design than I had in the first place.

Portlandflyer

Some important background on color theory.

I see a lot of pattern planes painted in colors that really don't go, so let's look at the basics:

Go to this page and for the "color wheels":

http://www.dimensionsthruart.com/pages.php?pageid=25

My basic color (theme) will be "Yellow". The first rule is "complementary" colors. So if we look at yellow, the color directly across from it is "violet".

The next rule is "Analogous" colors, which are the two colors on each side of yellow, so we have yellow/green and yellow/orange as options.

The third rule is "Triad" colors. If we draw an Equilateral triangle from our color (yellow) we have blue and red as color options.

So the colors we should consider working with are:

Yellow
Violet
Yellow/Green
Yellow/Orange
Red
Blue

We also have White, Black, Silver, Chrome, Aluminum, etc. that will go as well.

For this paint job I will be using:

Yellow
Blue
Red
Black
White
Orange (used for shading to create yellow/orange)
Pearl black
Aluminum
Red Candy
Highly thinned black

MAVROS

Hi Matt,

I am also following with interest as I am in the process of building a lighter wing for my Xigris.
May I ask what finish weights do you you get with your method for an F3A Wing.

kind regards

Mavros

AUSTRALIA