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Square Feet to paint estimate

mulde35d

Well Known Member
Friend
I am looking at paint and have the theoretical coverage in square feet per gallon, but what I don't know is how many square feet the RV-14 has to paint.

Does anyone have a good estimate on how many square feet need to be covered for the interior and separately for the exterior? It would save me buying too much or worse yet too little paint. I also don't like all the hazmat shipping fees so I am trying to do a single paint purchase for everything.

Since all paints have different amounts of square foot coverage, I am hoping to keep the estimate in square feet rather than how many cans someone's specific aircraft used. Thanks
 
We painted our RV-14A, using Sherwin-Williams SkyScapes GA system, a polyurethane/epoxy system. Turned out very nice, but paint was expensive like gold, so we tried to be very analytical in our acquisition process. In spite of that, ended up with probably 4 separate buys, but very little surplus. We found freight cost was peanuts compared to the cost of the material. And (FWIW) FedEx Ground did not impose a hazmat charge on small shipments of a few gals.

Here are calcs. we used (YMMV):

Exterior (Al) 325 SF
Exterior (Fiberglass) 125 SF
Interior (Al) 75 SF
 
Painting

I kept my paint skeem simple. Basically all white with a little color. I used Delfleet essential Factory pack GM 50 Olympic white and Nissan Extera Solar Yellow. Took it to a local autobody paint shop as I have been finishing up parts.

So far used about 2 gallons epoxy primer. A little less than 4 gallons white and 1 gallon of yellow plus variuos hardners and activators. Cost a little over $1,000.00+ for materials. White is least expensive with 1 gallon paint, hardner and activator costing $157.00.

Have not finished everything and my body shop guy isn't charging me an arm and leg labor. Figure my toyal cost around $4,000.00. If you paint it you will all the labor.

Allan
RV 14A N507PW
Finishing up
 
When ordering your paint keep in mind that most paint specs list ?theoretical? coverage which assumes 100% yield. Even with a HVLP gun the best you can achieve is 30% to 40%. The rest is overspray. With a conventional gun it is closer to 25%.
 
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