Section:

Hours: 7

I spent the last month working with Evoke Aircraft Design to come up with a paint scheme. I had seen a Mooney painted with a beautiful red, white and black paint scheme and used that as a starting point for the design. Evoke provided multiple sketches starting with that design and we ended up with something entirely different except for the colors. I worked on font design and font tools so I wanted to include some interesting typography in my design. Monotype just published a modern version of Helvetica which I used as a starting point for the full size N number. I found a weight that had stroke widths that comply with the FAA lettering requirements. We slanted the base line so it would be parallel to the ground when the tail wheel is on the pavement and I adjusted the italic angle so the letters would be upright when the airplane is in the air. I also designed a custom Rv14 logo for the tail.

I decided to use Kracon at KLHM to do the painting. My hanger mate had his RV7 painted there last year and the quality was very good. Today I brought the airplane to their shop and helped disassemble all the control surfaces and cowlings.

Section:

Hours: 6

Today I worked on a few tasks before taking the plane to the paint shop. First up I trimmed the wing tip trailing edges to match the trailing edge of the flaps. Rather than trim the entire trailing edge of the tip, I tapered it from the outboard tip to the flap. This left more of the trailing edge intact and visually is not noticable.

Next I used packing tape to mask off an area under the tail fairing and applied a mix of West Epoxy and micro balloons along the edges of the fairing. I then carefully put the fairing back on the airplane and screwed it into place, squeezing out excess epoxy as I went. This filled in the remaining gaps between the fairing and the airplane.

After the epoxy cured, I removed the fairing, removed the tape and then sanded the edges to a smooth rounded shape. Now the fairing matches the aluminum with almost no gap.