Thursday, February 26, 2009

War Bird - Restoring the battalion Insignia on a vintage WW2 RAF Spitfire

On Jan 28 I got a call from my client to come down to his Aircraft hanger and help with something he needed fixed on one of his planes.  I walked into a hanger filled with beautiful vintage aircraft. I was told that the RAF spitfire had been recently restored and shipped from England and had one final flaw that needed fixing before she could be flown. "The 28th Squadron's  insignia thats painted on the side of my plane looks like the donkey from Shrek!"
Honored and more than a little nervous, I began by carefully removing Shrek. It was extremely important not to damage the original field of white as it was painted with a specialized epoxy that had been sprayed directly to the plane's aluminum fuselage. Repainting the white square would require masking out the entire aircraft and spraying it out again.

Historically these planes were embellished by "fly boys" who used whatever paint might have been laying around the air field. I decided to use "OneShot" sign painters enamel because its durable and slow drying enough to manipulate the image as I work. When painting with enamel you need to be careful not to brush the surface to much because it does start to skin over. Because the white field of paint is completely cured, I can "edit" my freshly painted lines to perfection using a clean brush loaded with pure mineral spirits and a rag. 

Utilizing this removal technique requires that you let each layer cure overnight so that the solvent does not eat into the previous layers of paint. Its time consuming but the finished work has super clean lines and smooth flat color fields. 
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