I’m taking advantage of this relatively warm weather to get as much painting done as possible. Today was a long but productive day that started with getting the ailerons and right flap safely stored in the ceiling.
I covered those parts with plastic to protect them from dirt and overspray that might escape the booth.
Yesterday I wrote about the Sprayfine gravity gun. Today I learned about the packing nut that seals the needle. It was leaking pretty bad on my last round and I had to switch back to the Graco gun. I noticed that several of the o-rings in the gun were not holding up well, so I wondered if the leak was from those. I called the company to ask their tech support folks. The most surprising aspect of that call is that the person who answered the phone also answered my question. There was no menu structure, no receptionist, just a knowledgeable person on the phone. He said that any o-rings in the gun should be removed, as it was designed to function without them. I’m not sure how it is that I ended up being the person to have to remove them, but I was just glad to get the gun back up and running with no downtime waiting for parts. It turns out I just needed to tighten the packing nut a little. The supplied wrench for removing the nozzle was designed to also work on the packing nut, but due to manufacturing tolerances the slot wasn’t quite big enough. I fixed that with a dremel, but soon found that the metal that the wrench was made of was a little too soft to be effective. Instead I just started keeping a small crescent wrench in the paint booth with the gun tools.
The next round of parts included the lower door frames, rear cargo door frame, one of the upper front window frames, some of the rudder cable guards, the rudder pedal assembly, the control sticks, the seat adjustment levers, the flap handle parts, one of the wing struts, and likely a few others that I’ve forgotten about. After painting an airplane, the number of parts becomes especially apparent!