Painting Your Airplane - InTheHangar Ep 107 

These guys painted my leading edges on my Comanche and did a great job. Now I need my cowling done!

Good info, particularly on some things to look for when purchasing a plane. Thanks!

LOL I love the "paint your wagon" ref. Most people are not going to get it, but that old movie is awesome.

Great episode. Your guest were fantastic and very engaged.

Before painting your 210 consider hiring someone like the guy on the Aviana Aircraft Detailing channel. He is a magician with bringing old paint back to life. He travels and you could feature him on the channel and maybe get a discount for your plane, lol.

Another good point about painting airplanes white is resale value. You might like your plane to look a certain way, but to the general public that paint scheme or pictures or logos might be what's keeping them from buying it. I've seen aircraft sit on Trade-A-Plane for years because of this problem.

I painted my plane last year and yes the paint was not great prior to painting but the factor that make me do it was the corrosion issue. I was afraid that I might have more issues later by not painting than the cost of painting.

Strip it to the metal, give it a thick clear-coat, polish, enjoy feeling like you're flying a WW2 bomber.

That carbon fiber looking jet looked great.

Great information. So get a good in shape frame, put a new engine in, new avionics, new paint and new interior and you basically get a new plane at probably less than half the cost of new right? Then you end up with an airplane that is truly unique. Thanks for the video!

Great video

Painted Gulf Stream g200s along time ago. Couldn’t do much in factory painting without filling out paperwork. Also repairing parts for atr42&72s was the same.

Interesting Dan. For another perspective, Kevin (310 Pilot), just had his Cessna 310 painted. I believe they did the extensive version and removed all control surfaces. The results were very impressive. He may be willing to share the owners perspective in the process. JMHO --gary

Good interview Dan. I was curious if the aircraft with the new paint would then be valued that additional amount or some percentage of it. Thank you.

Hi Dan......Use the whitest white you can get as a base color and then your darker colors for stripes. Please don't paint the 210 a dark base color. I used the whitest white on my P-210 25 years ago and it still looks super. Great video.

Where are you located I have a 1964 Cessna 150 can you do aluminum work if needed

Regarding the ads I see a lot of car ads. Which is strange since I’m not in the market and don’t remember looking up new cars. Maybe they are telling me I am due for a car. Lol

Hmm... a dark plane leaking fuel on the ramp? You could have your own SR-71!

student here. do u mix the anti corrosion to the primer? which one are u supposed to apply first?

Making the assumption that planes to be painted are metal. No mention of fabric covered AC.

can you vinyl wrap a plane

Hey Dan, have you considered vinyl wrap? 3m actually has an aviation live of vinyl. It’s also a fraction of the cost for paint. Also, sounds like these guys don’t work on fabric covered aircraft?

Can I as a private certificate holder and owner strip the crappy paint off my C150? I would like to just have the cowling painted and a stripe, the rest bare aluminum... similar to c140. What I get from the video is yes, I am allowed to given that an A&P returns it to service after...(so good practice would be to consult with one first) For a 150 20k is acceptable for an engine overhaul not a paint job

come to mec aviation, only paint shop in Victorville ,CA. I paint really good , not charge $25000 to really good, just make it half.

Very interesting Dan. By the way....no relation to Luke or Jack that I know of lol. Sounds like it can be pretty expensive. Thanks for sharing.

HI -- Do Luke and Nicholson have a website for their painting company? Do you know how to get in touch with them?

B.S. White is the cheapest color!!👍👍😀

Part 43

Can you just go down to the local hardware shop, buy x amounts of liters of paint then hand it to the paint guy and they put it into a spray gun to paint the plane?

Ha Ha 25k

These guys are all wrong about white, what they said, complete BS as t o why you paint with white. The reason planes are painted white and have stripes of multiple colors has to do with the fact that you are painting aluminum and the nature of the use of the plane and design characteristics of an airplane. An airplane will be on a ramp in the sun and the surface can heat to 140 degrees and then take off and climb to 12,000 feet where the temperature is below freezing and then descend back to a hot ramp, or in the winter the temperature at atlitude for even your 210 may be far below zero. The plane will expand and contract very slightly. The design of an airplane requires wide expanses of several feet of nearly flat or gently curving spans of one piece of aluminum set in place with rivets. Temperatures on the engine cowling can stay hot when the sides are below zero. On a car, there are differences in temperatures, but the spans are shorter, and the material is usually steel, so when the various components of the car expand and contract at very slightly different rates, it doesn't show the buckling and slight movements that will show up over several feet across the wing or fuselage of an airplane. And a plane has more square feet of metal skin surface, so it is more likely to acquire minor imperfections from ground handling, door slams, even from strikes from big bugs. Those problems won't hardly be visible on a white airplane, but you will see every rivet, every minor wrinkle, every paint run, every place a modification was made, every past repair under the paint, every sin the ariplane has ever had will be brilliantly visible on a dark colored airplane. Ask any car restorer, he will tell you that if you have a car with problems that you need to hide, the color to paint it is titanium white, maybe an off white, but any dark color requires you to fix all of the imperfections, polish out all of the runs and orange peel, tape all of the joints and attachments. The white can be polished quickly and you're done and somebody has to look closely and critically to see the imperfections. A dark color or a brilliant color has to be polished and compounded perfectly to look good. An then anything minor that happens later will make the whole think look damaged. And then dark and brilliant colors look worse when they get dirty. Even just a little bit. If you thoroughly clean a black airplane (or even a black car) and then rinse it with water from a garden hose, the calcium in the water if it has the least bit of hardness will form a whiteish residue on your dark colored plane that will make the entire plane look dingy, even if it was just painted yesterday. You have to then polish the plane to get rid of that, and if you don't polish it perfectly, it will show every swirl and every polish stroke you made with your polisher or by hand. A white plane you can just wash with soap and water and rinse with a garden hose and leave the water spots because you'll never see them, and it looks great. Early aluminum airplanes were made with SO aluminum instead of the alclad that they started using in the 50s. A lot of the early aluminum airplanes were polished literally to hide the imperfections because they couldn't get white paint to stick to aluminum and white paint used to be the most expensive paint. The next time you go to a fly in, you should notice that as a general rule, not always, but usually, all of the modern aluminum planes are painted white with some sort of accent striping in certain places, and old aluminnum planes aren't painted at all. It is usually the wood and fabric planes that are painted everything except white and the aluminum planes are painted white. Consider that before you paint your 210 a really corporate looking dark color.

young and fast rich boys, take simple paintjob horriple big ower price and make lot money easy job. ewery men can paint own plane in hangar, only use paint remover and buy cheap urewthane paint and ready. not newer cost 15000-25000$ old cessna or piper can buy second plane this money.

DIY = Destroy it your self

Love your videos but these one sided political adds are driving me crazy. I know a dollar is a dollar but I'm getting tired of it. I think I will take a break from your videos until the election is over. Its not just you its all over the internet. This is coming from a registered democrat that votes for the best candidate not just checking my party's boxes.

I commented a while ago that if I hear "Pilot's License" one more time I'm gone. It is a certificate. Bye Bye.