B

Bourgoin

I'm New Here
Just painted my first test panel for my RV-9A and some of the rivets look like this. Obviously there are slight gaps on these rivets which the paint appears to have pulled into or away from. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? There are potentially hundreds of these...

I'm using a NAPA/Martin Senour paint system:

TE502 wash primer
5220 epoxy primer
Prism 60 paint (1 coat)

image_zpsde42225a.jpg



http://s1339.photobucket.com/user/drbourgoin/media/image_zpsde42225a.jpg.html
 
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Looks pretty normal to me. Maybe your choice of color is exacerbating the effect. Yellow is a fairly transparent color.
 
Rough

One of the paint shops I talked to before settling on the one I'm using talked about this exact effect. They proclaimed that they used a SS wire wheel in a drill motor to lightly scratch every rivet on the airframe prior to any other prep work to eliminate this effect. They even had pictures of an RV-10 they were painting prior to priming. It looked pretty funny with all the rivets abraded with the wire wheel but it kind of made sense to me. Now I know why they wanted over $10K to paint one!!!
 
Ron Bowers showed me on his award winning 8, that he would squeegee over the rivets with thinned pro seal (small areas at a time) and then immediately go back and wipe with mineral spirits or mek. This would seal between the rivet head edge and the skin so the paint had a continues surface....... You could see the rivets..... It looked great.
 
Are you using a HVLP sprayer? Had that on mine using PPG Concept with a HVLP spay gun. We were thinning the paint more than recommended to get it to spray good and thought the thin paint pulled from the rivets due to the very low viscosity of the thinned paint. We ended up spraying several coats to get the rivets covered, especially with the dark colors. Since painting my RV my hanger mate bought a good high pressure gun and has had no problems spaying the same paint on another airplane. With the high pressure gun he was able to thin per the directions and not get the paint crawling off the rivets.
 
Are you using a sealer over the primer, just under the color? Makes a big difference!
 
Thanks for the suggestions. We are going to try putting another coat of yellow on the panel to see if that helps. Also...the primer used was gray and like Brantel said...since the yellow is somewhat transparent it shows through around the rivets. We are going to try a white primer next time.

If none of that works...I will try a light sealer around the rivets to keep the paint from wicking around them.
 
Tried another coat of paint. It looked a lot better but still had "rings around a few rivets.

So...I took the flaps and ailerons and sealed all the rivets by applying epoxy with a squeegee and then wiping the excess with a solvent. Looks like that may do the trick. Just dropped the parts off at the painter so we'll see how it goes!
 
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