WEll, the Bat Plane is finally ready to go. I finally got a header that works (after a lot of work with a down and rubber hammer). And I got the leadouts wrapped (geez, two hours of tedious work - I hate wrapping leadouts). But for all that, it's ready to go. This weekend if we get anything like decent weather. Supposed to be partly cloudy and 45° on Saturday. Final, all up weight is more than I hoped for (about 58oz on 660 square inches). Man, that not only an ugly finish, it's a heavy on. If the plane flies well, it may be looking at refinsh somewhere down the line. But for now, it's not too heavy, straight and probably adequtely powered. Hopefull, I won't need to add any more weight to it to balance. Guess we'll see.

I'll shoot a picture of the finish product at some point.

Randy,

Sorry, I was tired last night after getting the thing ready. I'll take one tonight.

Randy,

I know, and I understand, but I still dig it!
despite being cosmetically challanged, I hope it flies well for you.

Randy, I think it looks great.

Matt,

I'm mostly just whining about the thing. I learned yet another valuable lesson: don't try 4 different new techniques on the same plane. It's just asking for trouble. the masking took awhile. Unfortunately, I was being clever in using several shades of metallic undercoat the 2 different candy overcoat colors and it didn't really allow a lot of overmasking. It was basically mask off a color, shot paint, pull tape and re-mask for each color. It's much better if you can design a paint scheme that allows you to tape, shoot, add more tape, shoot, etc. Then pull all the tape at once. Eric Viglione did this on his very cool new plane and trust me, it make life a lot easier. He probably (I'm guessing) had 3-4 hours in total taping time. I had maybe 25 hours. Talk about tedious.

And I really wish I would have used white as the base color. Sigh...