While some comments offered here clearly suggest otherwise, I am NOT going to make the
assumption you plan on painting your RV. For all I know, you may decide to polish it instead. If you do decide on polish, consider my first hand up close and personal experience with long attached vinyl covering.
My RV is likely the first RV ever to take flight with its protective vinyl almost completely intact. Not only that, I did not cut out the traditional strips of vinyl along the rivet rows like everybody else does. No, I did it the hard way.....by heating a small circle around every single rivet hole, then removing the remnant using nothing more than my thumbnail. Usually, I did all that with a random skin pulled from the crate, positioned upon my lap while seated in front of the TV set.
That "waste of time" might seem overly, even grossly anal to most builders and for those builders it probably is. Still, I did manage to build the
standard kit airplane in slightly less than 24 months of actual labor so the manner in which I chose to deal with the vinyl did not account for nearly as much time as some less anal builders might inaccurately
assume (there's that word again).
The RV-8 flies wonderfully and with all of 4 hours TT on it now, I finally got around to removing its clad of vinyl, all of it in place for at least 4-5 years that the kit was in my possession and who knows how long the vinyl was in place before that. That said, working alone it did take me the better part of an hour to completely remove all traces of vinyl from the airframe but in my defense, there was
a lot of vinyl to remove. Still, what should be obvious to anyone is taking less than one hour to remove
all traces of it shouts out loud and clear that peeling it away was (for me at least) a non-event, especially when one considers the morning temperature was 62? meaning the airframe was relatively cool and the vinyl significantly stiffer and less pliable than if warm.
Because I plan to at least partially polish the RV, having protected the skins the way I did will VASTLY lessen the time it will take to bring out the shine without having to spend a lot of time dealing with inevitable scratches and blemishes that would have almost certainly occurred if unprotected skins were exposed to a typical shop environment over an indefinite period of time. Those who polish their aircraft know exactly what I am talking about. Also worthy of note and contrary to some reports, upon the vinyl's removal I observed absolutely no corrosion whatsoever.
So what do we make of all this? After all, Van's
does recommend removing the vinyl. Keep in mind that Van's does have to address a worldwide audience. That is a very large tent encompassing a wide variety of climatic conditions. If I lived near salt water or other less forgiving environment, I likely would have removed the vinyl per Van's suggestion. Now I am not going to suggest you do what I did. That would be irresponsible. But I am suggesting that just because this builder or that builder reports trouble removing the vinyl, so too will you. Horse hockey! In my experience, large areas of vinyl peeled off in
sheets....literally....in sheets. Alas, after shedding its protective vinyl for good, as of today my RV-8 adopted the look of almost every other unpainted RV out there. But for awhile at least, LuLu stood alone and sure looked cool sporting that unique and distinctive shade of blue!
Like everything else when it comes to building RV's, consider what others have to say about this and about that. In the end, however, it is our own inner voice that really counts.
