Aircraft painting is a strange business. When I was ready to get my newly-finished RV-8 painted, I started by doing some online searches. However, many paint shops don’t have an online presence at all, or have one that is many years old and badly in need of updating. I quickly came to the conclusion that this is primarily a word-of-mouth business that really doesn’t need to advertise. The shops I eventually talked to were all booked well into the future, so I guess this business model works for them.
I got some names from www.schemedesigners.com (but they did not do the design), searched the forums for paint shop stories, and asked everyone I knew for recommendations. I really didn’t want to fly across the country for paint, but I was willing to go up to about 1000 miles if necessary. After all, RVs can cover distance fairly quickly.
I initially contacted about 10 paint shops. Four of them never even returned my phone call or email. One answered the email about two months later with an “attached quote” that wasn’t attached. Another told me that their business was based on reputation, and that if I wasn’t already strongly considering them, nothing he could say would make me change my mind. Yet another spent quite a bit of time on the phone and in email exchanges, but after I went to visit their shop I never heard from them again. They even told me, on multiple occasions, to call and remind them if they forget to communicate. It seems like all paint shops concentrate their energies on painting and don’t really care too much about the administration end of things. Needless to say, this part of the process was very discouraging for me.
The actual review is in the next post -- due to post size limitations...
And now to the point of the story… I finally decided to go with Cardan Aircraft Services in Red Bluff, California, for the following reasons:
1. I liked their facility. They have three separate hangars – one for assembly/disassembly, one for prep work (acid wash, etc.), and one for painting. I visited another paint shop that had only one hangar, and everything in there had overspray on it. That was a big red flag for me.
2. I liked the people. Mike and Dave were always pleasant, professional, low-key, and very patient with my stupid questions. In short, they are the kind of people you’d want to do business with.
3. I liked the location. Red Bluff is only an hour flight for me.
4. I really liked the price. You have to be careful when comparing prices because different paint shops include different things in their quotes. Some include a certain number of hours of body work in their base price, some include assembly/disassembly, etc. Taking all of this into consideration, Cardan was the lowest price and they were 50% less (no, that’s not a typo) than the most expensive quote I got. Some of that probably comes from the fact that they use DuPont Imron paint, which is supposedly less expensive than JetGlo.
Cardan takes in one airplane per week. The next available slot was three months in advance, so I put my name on it and sent them a small deposit. I subsequently had to move the slot two months further into the future due to some work-related conflicts, and that was no problem for Cardan. During this intervening time, I finalized my design. I looked at a bunch of pictures online and settled on a half-dozen that I liked. This got narrowed down to one, which I subsequently heavily modified using Photoshop. The final version is a very simple, two-color design with no fancy extras.
Some people know exactly how they want their airplane to look, but I’m not one of those people. I had a basic design and color choice in mind, but I was very open to suggestions from Cardan. They worked with me via email on design refinements, and I even went to visit them several times to talk about it in person and draw on the airplane with a sharpie. In the end, I gave them my Photoshop creation and said, “Make it look something like this.” I let them pick the color shades and determine the final positioning of the lines. After all, they’ve seen hundreds of airplanes and they do this for a living. They’re much more qualified than I am to be making those decisions. As long as the finished product didn’t look butt-ugly, I was going to be okay with it.
For scheduling reasons, I dropped off the airplane on the Friday of the week before I was supposed to be there. Again, that was no problem for the easy-going guys at Cardan. It took me five hours to disassemble it. I took all of my tools with me, but Cardan also has a very complete tool collection that they made available to me. This surprised me because mechanics are generally very protective of their tools, and for good reason – when you loan out your tools, they often tend to get broken and/or grow legs and disappear. As an aside, I left my tools at Cardan for the month, and none of them grew legs.
Cardan sent me progress pictures of the different stages of the painting process. They also called me when they had questions about something. In the end, the paint job was complete exactly four weeks after they started – right when they said it would be. On time, and under budget!
Reassembling the plane took much longer than the disassembly – 13 hours, to be exact. I went slowly so as to not screw up the new paint. I also wanted to make darn sure I did everything correctly. I took copious notes and pictures prior to the disassembly and made a checklist so I would do things in the proper order. I knew ahead of time that I didn’t want to get in a hurry and make a potentially deadly mistake, so I planned to stay at the Comfort Inn in Red Bluff for the night. This is the only hotel that offers complimentary shuttle service to the airport, and there are several restaurants next to the hotel. It’s about a ten minute drive from the airport.
During the reassembly I learned something that might be beneficial to someone in the future. Cardan did an excellent job of masking. They even went so far as to mask the insides of the rod-end bearings so they could paint the outsides. However, some paint still got on the bearings. Not a big deal, but removing it added to the reassembly time. In retrospect, I would have told them to mask off the entire rod-ends (not just the bearings).
The only thing that didn’t go back together properly was the forward baggage door. My door was very tight fitting in the first place. I made it that way so it would stay flush with the fuselage. However, the thickness of the new paint on the door and the fuselage was just enough to prevent the latch from engaging with the door closed. I solved the problem temporarily by reaming out the holes in the UHMW latch blocks, but I’ll probably have to make some new blocks to do it correctly. Again, not a big deal, but it’s something to consider if you’re painting an RV-8.
I would highly recommend Cardan Aircraft Services. The price is right, and the people are great. You can contact them at 530-527-6547 or [email protected]. They apparently have no shortage of business, so call them at least three months (or more) in advance.
Here’s a picture of my plane so you can see what they did. More pictures of the painting process can be found at http://rv8.gwevans.net. Look in the “Phase Two: Flying and Maintaining” section.
