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Main Air Frame
If you are a slow builder or in a damp environment you need to keep all of the metal pieces from rusting so be sure to keep it all oiled well or you'll get pin hole rust spots all over.
The frame isn't square by any means and in the beginning if you measure it all off and get an idea of how it lays, so to speak, things will go much more easily for you. We didn't do this until way on down the line when we had trouble fitting the windshield to the ship.
All is pretty cut and dry here with the only decision to make being to paint or powdercoat. We didn't go the powdercoat way because after researching it all we found
1 ...Information that it doesn't really adhere to the surface it envelopes it.
2....If its scraped or damaged you cant repowdercoat it, you have to spot paint it. It's tough stuff and one would have to go to extremes to spot paint it to the point of looking like it did when it was new.
3....The final thing was that we found information on a heli web site that the NHRA banned the use of powder coating on dragsters because it had a characteristic of hiding cracks......Not Good at all!.
4....If you go by the book building the ship you build the main part of the frame up and then at a point you take it apart and send it to the paint shop for paint. When you get it back and if you've had it powered coated the frame, due to the heat process it goes through and the manor in which it was hung, it may not lay the same as it did when you sent it. Perhaps it all depends on the people that do it I guess but an eighth of an inch is alot when it comes to how things fit in the big picture of this thing as you will see when you get to the body.
whether you paint or powdercoat, the frame needs to be sandblasted or bead blasted to clean the metal for coating.
Our Vote is for Bead blasting
A....because it shotpeens the metal, compresses it so to speak.
B....doesn't take as much off the metal avoiding thin spots a little better especially if mr heavy hand gets ahold of it.
We have had bad things happen to some of the things we've sent out to have blasted in the past so since this thing is kind of important to us we did it all ourselves to avoid the latter situation because we were afraid if someone got carried away during the process it could leave a thin spot in the tubing perhaps causing it to fracture.
When you get your frame back after what ever process you choose you still have many places you have to grind flat, drill, and even cut away metal from like the fuel tank brackets up the line so you'll be spotting the frame whether you like it or not.
We read all the books and watched all the videos and decided to completely build our ship and then tear it back down again so we wouldn't have to spot repair all those places. It added alot of time doing it twice so to speak but we think it was worth it and while we were reassembling it we had alot more knowledge of the big picture and understood alot of things in a whole new light.
If we were to build another one we'd do it the same way.
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