Well,
I deliberated about posting any pictures of the progress on the Avenger, In the long run I figured I might make a lesson from my trials.
I have been working rather feverishly to get her done for theREgionals next weekend. It was going well. I did find some issues during painting that were troublesome but as Randy says all the time, and I agree, a paint job is never done just abandoned so I elected to live with them, the end purpose still being served I felt.
Saturday Wed night last week, and Thursday after work I got the sealer coat on and the base colors. I was pretty happy with the effect I dreamed up, subtle, classy and still unique. so I spent friday after work getting my vinyl cutter up and running. Turns out there are no drivers available for windows Vista to run my cutter so I had to pull out the old desktop machineand hook it back up. long story short I got the cutter working with a few foibles along the way. Lesson learned, when preparing files for Pat to laser cut, they need to be polylines,, if you dont, then the laser tries to cut the line several times over,, not good. the vinyl cutter is the opposite, it cuts the lines multiple times if it IS a polyline,, sigh. Anyway , I got around that and got all my masks cut in Gerber mask ready to spray. i went over to the shop and proceded to spray the color. It all appeared to go well. I wasnt ultimatly thrilled with the one color I picked in the trim but the clear would have made it kick better so it was going to be ok. That is until I pulled the mask from the second wing,, the first one was fine, came up clean and looked pretty good. The second one pulled all the color off the sealar coat! Nothing different, nothing changed it just happened. I still have not decided what actually happened to cause this. I always lecture about using products that are designed to work together, not mixing brands, thinners, material types and such not. The reason I am so adamant about this is that I have used the CORRECT materials and had issues,, so to mix things that are not intended to work together is only compounding an issue already. As you can see, I know personally what can happen even when using the correct materials.
as a way of background, the wing is covered in polyspan and butyrate. After covering, I had concerns about the torsional rigidity of the wing so rather than strip it, I elected to cover over that with silkspan. ultimatly, this added about 2.5 ounces to the finish weight but I figured I had the best of both worlds, the puncture resistance of the polyspan, and the stability of the silkspan so it was worth it. After sanding that, and insureing it was plenty dry, I sprayed a coat of catalysed sealer over the dope to prevent the solvents from swelling the laquer. This again is a security step to insure no interaction between the dope and the top coats. Sealer is intended for exactly that purpose, to prevent undercoat swelling and promote adhesion,, hmmmm. then the top coats were all PPG base coat sprayed at the reccomended mixtures and application times. The model was cleaned between coats, and between mask and spray operations. Still, the issue arose. I have not really determined what happened and I am not sure I will. The strangest part is that it appears to only be on one wing. So bottom line, I have painted cars since about 1981, and despite doing everything right, s**t still happens. hence, knowing that when everythign is apparantly right, things go wrong, why would you even consider shortcutting things and adding another layer of possible problems to the process.
As Pat always tells me,, ( usually after a crash lol) take a bad thing and use it for an oppurtunity. So, this will allow me to go back and correct the little issues that I discovered, and I am contemplating stripping the covering from the wing and just using silkspan to bring it back up again. this will save me at least the 2 and a half ounces I gained by double covering.
so, there, It happens to all of us,, even the "proffesionals" My hope is that you will use this as a lesson to realize, dont add that layer of chance to the finishing process, its challanging enough without it!