Goat painting

The wings have been slow progress, but are about to be done later this morning!  I switched away from using old chairs as sawhorses and brought up my workbench table from the basement so I could flip the Goat wing upside down and paint the bottoms.

I have a little tupperware for keeping the mixed paint fresh.  When more is needed, I pour 120 grams of paint into the tupperware, pour in 40 grams of water, mix with a popsicle stick, and then start painting again.  It takes about 3 minutes to cycle a new mix.

The foam brushes have been a bit kludgy.  The 87-cent brushes from the local Home Depot are soft and tended not to last one coat before a cut appeared in the foam.  The 1-buck brushes from Michaels are a bit stiffer and tend to last much longer, but eventually start to come apart and drop foam debris into the paint.  Maybe I'm just trying to use a throw-away product longer than it should be used...

Freshly mixed paint goes on a bit watery, which is awesome for coverage.  As I get deeper into the mix, the paint feels more sticky and takes more effort to spread nicely.  It probably could get thinned back out with more water.  Usually 120 grams of mix is not too much for being sticky if I'm using it all that same day.

The first coat on fabric tends to absorb about twice as much paint as subsequent coats.  Surely this is because the paint is going through the pores and putting coverage on both the outside and inside.  After that first coat dries, the subsequent coats only put paint on the outside and thus stretch much farther over more surface area.

I estimate that painting Goat has been about three quarters of a gallon of the Glidden Gripper white primer paint.  Some of that mass certainly off-gasses and does not count toward the final airplane weight, but this is still roughly 10 pounds of mass for paint.  Recall I'm using three coats total on every surface (except the bottom of the wings that will not see the same UV load).

Between coats two and three, I have been using 180 grit sandpaper (lightly!) over most of the surface area to knock down any dust or bumps in the paint layer.  It takes extra special care at any hard corners to not sand through the fabric -- basically, don't sand at corners. 

The last coat is drying now, then I'll do an assembly with the whole of Goat covered later today.  Stand by for a cool photo!