Fuselage preparation and painting

The fuselage is very good in terms of surface quality. I use 100 grit sand paper to sand the mold seams where the fuse halves are joined together. I usually end up sanding thru the white gel coat and expose some pin holes. I take a pin and mine out all the gelcoat to expose the cavity. I like to use DAP vinyl spackle to fill in the pin holes. Dap is easy to use and it dries fast. This is a multi step process. DAP is smeared on the seams with your finger. After it dries, sand it off with 220 to 320 grit. DAP shrinks, so we need to spackle again to fill up the holes. After it dries, I sand off with 400 grit. Keep repeating the process until the DAP is flush with the surface. Remember DAP is softer than the fiberglass. It is easy to over sand the DAP. Also I lightly sand the fuselage with 400 or 600 grit to remove any mold release and give a better surface for the primer. I apply a thinned coat of PPG K-36 primer over the fuse. I double prime the mold seam areas that were finished with DAP. This helps expose any remaining surface irregularities. After the primer dries, I use DAP to fill in any remaining pin holes (there were almost none, the quality was that good). I come back and do a light spot primer on all remaining areas. It's OK if there are minor shades of white on the fuse. Since I paint the main fuse in white, the difference between the light grey primer and the white gel coat gets covered over with the white PPG concept paint. The trick to keeping the weight down is not to put paint on top of paint. Here I paint my first trim color. The bottom trim color will be painted next followed with the remaining white. I do paint the remaining trim colors (maroon, yellow and metallic blue) over the white. These do not have much surface area to add much extra weight. I use the 3M blue fine line vinyl masking tape at the paint lines.

I'm a one trick horse. I paint all my pattern planes with the same color scheme.