Bahamas bound!!!

Hang with me on this. It's "project time"!!!!

We are going to the Bahamas next year...... In our airplane........

The FAA now requires that you have very "visible" registration numbers on your aircraft. Just in case the F-16's want to buzz around your aircraft - they want to be able to identify you.

But, alas, our airplane was manufactured prior to this requirement. Our airplane's registration numbers are small. Entirely legal for flight inside the borders of the U.S.A. See?  The numbers are visible as small gold digits near the tail of the aircraft.   We have to fix that!!!

So, we start painting!!  Lots and lots and lots and lots.....of tape.

Duane wanted to do a nice "outline" for the numbers.....so, it's about twice as much tape!!   Here the airplane is all wrapped up ready for the "outline" color (brown to match the bottom stripe).

Trust me - it will make sense in the end!

Brown painted for the outline.....

OK, now it gets a little complicated - next, the outline has to be masked over for some primer to be applied to the inside of the numbers.

Primer applied so the "under colors" don't show thru.

At this point, we still hadn't decided on the exact color for the numbers.   So, I went to Lowe's - and got about a hundred paint chips....No, we're not using regular paint.  The paint we're using is very expensive 3-part Acrylic Polyurethane.  We just used the chips to decide what color we wanted - took the chip to the paint shop and had them mix it. 

Drum roll........

And the color is GOLD!  To match some emblems on the plane and it goes nicely with the earth tones of the airplane.

Just page thru the "unveiling":

Peeling the masking (in the reverse order in which it was applied):

And there you go - ready (almost) for the Bahamas!!!