PAINTED!

I talked to Colin this morning and he said, "Nope, doesn't look like we'll paint it today. Still more prep to do."

Then at 7 pm he called back and said, "Hey, it's BLUE!" And sure enough, the pictures started arriving.

Here's a shot of it ready to go into the spray booth. The lower rub rail is taped off here because they had (earlier) sprayed a sort of stoneguard paint on the lower sections. This tape was removed before the primer went on because we want it to be body colored.



It went into the paint booth next, but the trailer was too long to fit. So they built a tent around the part that didn't go into the spray booth. The primer, as you can see, is gray. Since we are using a wet-on-wet paint, it only needed to set for about 90 minutes before the color coat went on.



Next was the color coat -- the long-awaited Mistral Blue Metallic. This shot in the spray booth doesn't really do it justice. We'll get more photos tomorrow in the sunlight, with the tape off, and I'll be over there on Saturday to take a few more glamour shots.



A final spray with clearcoat was applied, and with that, the job is basically done. Of course, there's more work to do, including removing a TON of masking tape both inside and out, and putting everything back together. We need to reinstall the clearance lights, the rub rail insert (black), clean up any errors or do misc buffing, etc. We also want to spray the A/C cover the body color so it will match and be less noticeable.

You can see a lot more photos at the Vintage Thunder gallery. See http://www.pbase.com/airstreamlife/vt_paint

There's more to say but that's all the time I have tonight. More posts are coming tomorrow and over the weekend! The axles are expected to arrive tomorrow (Friday) and they will be installed soon.