Is there a good way to remove old Tail number if it’s painted to the wing and fuselage?
Looking at an older plane and the tail number is painted/clearcoated.
One way is to put a sticker over everything.
Or you need to paint whats needed to get it good?
Any good ideas.
You can sand it down(våtslipa) and then apply new paint on top before putting new stickers on there.
But depending on the paint it might be tricky to avoid visible edges.
Problem is that the color is Burgundy Metallic.
And the paint was painted 2005…
Your tip is a solution that might work if I manage to color match it.
…so….has a plane now been bought!?! We are curious! ;-)
With my Grumman, after researching the various methods of painting and realizing that aircraft painting is a massively complicated undertaking, I just bought vinyl lettering to cover the prior registration number. It ain’t pretty but will be ok until I can afford a re-spray.
We had a similar problem with our former C177RG . The paintjob was relatively fresh and in excellent condition so it seemed like a bad idea to paint over the metallic green…you would never match the edges and as a minimum you would have to paint whole panels.
We found dark green vinyl to cover the old registration and temporarily placed the new markings on top with white vinyl too.
The end result was as good as this
…and when the aircraft was sold eight years later it still had the temporary markings on. The new owner decided to apply a new paint job though…
If you can find a reasonably colour-matching vinyl it should work fine until you get around to repainting it.
The one I’m looking at is more or less the same in your picture but Red metallic instead.
Using a large Vinyl sheet as cover might work, but it ain’t pretty.
Else you need to respray bottom half of aircraft and that sounds expensive.
I’ve asked the shop for a quote and we’ll see what the comes up with.
Another way might be to spray a white rectangle, and then Black Vinyl letters on that.
Not sure how to do that under the wing, maybe something similar, wing is white and won’t be that noticeable…
As long as you don’t paint dark colours edge to edge you should be fine. Someone who is painting all the time will make light work of it. Probably machine polish it to see what it will come up like once polished, get a polished panel off and have it matched with a spectrometer. Then machine polish the entire aircraft once it’s done to “loose” the new paint. Then decal the new reg.
I even write it in aircraft advert descriptions if the registration is just decals, it’s a selling point.
