This is what Blue looked like before I began to repaint her.

I started sanding the white and green stripes off the nice blue base paint in February. In March I had most of the stripes sanded out, made new covers for the wing junctions, sanded off a lot of blue dust, refurbished a nose bowl, removed the strobe light from the rudder, put on wing tip strobes, and sanded some more, lots more. In April I put everything back together and flew her out to Rick Hamilton, the painter, for final sanding and paint spraying.

I've always liked the scalloped look on old airplanes, so in choosing a paint layout for Blue I looked at lots of pictures of Gee Bee's and classic fabric planes. I made dozens of colored drawings on Tri-Pacer outlines and looked at them for many months. Eventually I narrowed the drawings down to two favorites and then painted a small model airplane with the one I liked best. I loved the scalloped wings, but unfortunately my designs made the fuselage look even shorter than it really is. Back to the drawing board. As new ideas came up, masking tape was used to test the different layouts.

I saw a picture of a pretty Tri-Pacer belonging to Dave Stafford and tried several modifications of his lower half with a swoopy upper half. These designs made my little plastic model look longer and it worked well in masking tape on the real plane.

The white coat sure looked strange with all the moving parts missing.

When it came down to laying tape on the all white airplane, I had a good idea how everything would come out. There are always those last minute thoughts, but I resisted them and I'm glad because it came out really nice. 

In early May, Rick sprayed the blue Imron paint. After a day of curing, she was ready for the unwrapping.

Here's the almost finished new paint. There's still lots of little trim work to do and some small details to take care of before I'll consider the paint job really done. It's good to have Blue back in the sky.