Jim Moorehead wrote: > A lot has been said about your paint color selection. Did you paint > the bottom of your airplane using your new $50.00 43430 HVLP paint gun from > Harbor Freight?
Actually, I painted it with an old DeVilbiss that I've had for 15 years. But it made a huge mess with all the overspray. When I was finished, I had some paint left over in the gun, so I poured it into the Harbor Freight Special and it worked beautifully with very little overspray. I was mainly worried about the required air capacity (9.5-14.8), since my old 2 HP air compressor was 20 years old when I got it, 25 years ago, and it's supposedly only good for about 9 cfm at 90 psi. Of course, capacity numbers mean nothing without a pressure given (and there is no pressure listed in the "instruction sheet"), and even my old compressor could easily keep up with it. Today I used the 43430 to shoot primer on the "door sills", and it worked fabulously. I plan to use it to shoot the real thing, hopefully tomorrow. My wife has informed me that I'm taking the afternoon off to paint the plane. We'll see if that happens, considering I worked until 3AM this morning at Teledyne Brown, and have 80 hours in for the WEEK! But tomorrow may be the last 80 degree day we have this year, so I'm going to lobby hard. That means I've got a lot of sanding to do between now and nightfall, and then I'm going to have to build a paint booth out of PVC pipe and plastic. As an aside, the guy at the paint store said that HVLP wouldn't flow enough to use on clearcoat. I guess I'll try that tomorrow, and if he's right, I'll drag out the old DeVilbiss to finish the job. He said some painters use an HVLP for paint, and conventional gun for clear. It would certainly work fine for acrylic enamel, though. Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
