Tuesday 1 ~ Thursday 24
To do this easily I needed some way of easily laying the Europa on its side. I have seen a couple of ideas on the WEB but I decided to go with my own design. I made a frame from 20mm ply.
This jig lets me roll the whole fuselage through 180 degrees quite easily.
The first step was to wash the fuselage down. I used the Poly Fiber 310 Alkaline Cleaner and then finished up with the Prep Wipe. I gave the fuselage a light scuff sand, but as I got into this a little more I realized that I would have been better off being a little more aggressive at this stage. I think it would have saved extra sanding effort of the Super Prime.
The Poly fiber book tells you to put on 6 coats, 2 hours apart with a foam roller. I thought that this was a lot of material, but don't be fooled. The roller applies this stuff pretty thinly and the 6 coats ultimately hardly seemed enough. There were no special tricks to this operation, all I needed to do was to plan on a 12 hour day.
I spent the next couple of weeks sanding this back. I first started with a foam sanding block but quickly changed over to a jitter bug sander with 320 grit paper. This little devil soon kicked up a dust storm and after a day of creating a mess I had to come up with a better way. I went down to the hardware store to see if I could get an attachment to connect it to my vacuum cleaner, and I was able to find some plastic tubing and hose to do the job. I found that this set up had the added advantage of pulling dust away from the surface and the cutting back was quicker.
The Poly Fiber book suggested spraying a light coat of Black Spray lacquer as a guide coat. I was a bit reluctant to do this but it turned out to be a great idea. It was perfect for showing up all of the little pits in the surface. Once I had done this it got me thinking that I should have done more sanding before I even put the Super fill primer on.
I found that the areas towards the back of the fuselage didn't sand nearly as well with the Jitter bug sander. The curves in the surface made it too easy to cut too deep and I ultimately found I was better off just using a hand sanding block
What I would do differently
I am going to try a couple of things differently when I roll the fuselage over and do the other side. Firstly, after washing it down I am going to rub the whole thing down with 180 grit paper. What I found was that although the gel coat surface looks nice and smooth there are a few high spots. They become apparent later, and I ended up with spots where the smooth prime was rubbed completely off. The other thing I am going to do differently is to apply 3 coats with the roller and then colour sand it back with fairly heavy grit such as 180 or 220. I am then going to apply the last few coats with a spray gun and then (hopefully) go over it with paper in the range of 280~320 grit. While this sounds like a lot of work I think I can go faster by using a heavier paper earlier in the process and then get by with a quick rub over of the sprayed coats. Give me another month and we will find out if this approach is any faster.
I was away traveling in Asia on business for the next couple of weeks. The nice part of it was that I managed a bit of a break and visited family and friends in Australia.