Maule Driver wrote:

Is that without paint?

That's the whole job, paint and all. I got that price from Rautgunde several
years ago, though. It may have gone up. They also had a price of ~$15,000 for a
complete renovation.

By the way, I have a '96 "we have them on sale" MX7180a model (actually
built in '95). Not the good paint (still doing it against the hangar
wall). Not the really bad (auto)paint. IOTW, it chips off slowly.

If I'd bought the 180, I might still have mine. On the other hand, the loan
would've been larger and I might have lost it all.

I found out what the paint scheme was from a Randolph representative at Oshkosh
several years ago. He said that Maule used the Ceconite process, which specifies
a coat of nitrate dope, followed by silver butyrate. He said they would add a
coat of white butyrate over the silver as a primer and then spray the enamel
over that. He said it was possible to sand off the color coats (the enamel) down
to the white dope primer or even down to the silver. Don't go into the silver
coat at all -- if you see it, stop. Once you get the enamel off of the fabric,
spray with butyrate rejuvenator. After that, you can apply either polyurethane
or butyrate top coats.

If you're plane is like mine was when I sold it, you can see patches of the
white butyrate where the color coats have flaked off of the horizontal stabilizer.

We did not discuss redoing the paint on the metal or fiberglass sections (unless
maybe he was recommending that technique for those sections too). I know that
the upper surfaces of my wings were badly peeled by the time I sold it, so
something would have to be done there. Since chemical paint strippers will melt
Ceconite in a heartbeat, I would consider something like bead-blasting.

Randolph made the paints Maule was using back then.

George Patterson
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to
use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.