Thanks guys,

Yes I did paint it. The pictures don’t do it a lot of justice, but gives you an idea of how it looks.

If anyone is interested, True Fire is a painting technique developed by a Mike Lavallee. His company is Killer Paint. If you go to his web site you can see some pretty incredible pictures.

This was a fairly long drawn out process to get to where it is now. I had the idea of painting a pattern plane in True Fire, but had never done it. I have a pretty good background in airbrushing, but hadn’t done any for the last twenty years. At Coast Airbrush I found Mike had put out an instructional DVD. I studied the DVD several times and practiced on a piece of sheet metal. I must have about 1/8 of an inch of paint on that panel.

I had already committed to build the Arixtra so I knew it was going to be a challenge to do it and keep the weight down. The Arixtra fuselage is built by Krill and was ultra light, but the canalizer is about 4 oz, so I had that handicap going in. The wings and stabs are sheeted foam, so again, light, but not ultra light. I knew I was going to have to glass the wings and stabs to do the paint job, so throughout the build I ran I detailed spreadsheet on every gram that went into the plane. I didn’t commit to the paint job until I felt I could keep the final weight down. My goal was to be at 10 pounds 11 ½ oz AUW. When I got all done I had missed it a hair and it came in at 10 pound 13 oz.

I only glassed the top of the wings and stabs to keep the weight down. The bottoms are Ultracote. It’s painted in House of Kolor paints which are pretty incredible. The paint job itself is vey light as it goes on in ultra thin coats. The weight comes from the glassing and the clear coat. The biggest chore in any paint job is the prep work. I spent hours getting the glassed surface extremely smooth, filled and level. After paint and two coats of clear I leveled the clear with 1000 grit followed by 1,500. After sanding I rubbed it out with compound and finished it with hand glaze.

The painting actually goes very fast. In fact the faster you do it the better it looks. When you slow down, it tends to look mechanical versus organic. This is one of those things that someone asks you “how long did it take to do that”. The reply is “thirty years”…it took me that long to figure out how to do it.