A question for you "dopers" out there.

I have seen a Citabria fabric aircraft sitting in a shop with the floor
covered in big paint pieces that I was told had been stripped by using shop
air and a small air nozzle on a blow gun. I had flown the aircraft
previously and while it's dope (could be paint?) wasn't great it was
flyable. I was told that the surface coat had come off surprisingly easily
and the silver primer that was left looked like it would not require much
further preperation for paint. I was told it only took a couple of hours.
If I remember correctly the wings and control surfaces were removed and
finished separately. Is it common to be able to remove paint or dope in
this manner?

"George Patterson" wrote in message
news:9j9Ne.10281$Yb.7100@trndny06...
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.