L3 Certification Build: 8" Upscale Frenzy

Congrat Nathan, I just read through this entire thread. Just a little detail I might have missed. After the color was complete, it went to clear coats right? How many coats did you do of clear and what clear do you use? Would you talk a little more about your wet sanding, what grits are you using and what are you looking for before moving onto the next grit? I found this entire thread very helpful, thank you for taking the time to share your experience.

Mendal

How could one not want to do rocketry after watching that video?

Gorgeous rocket and wonderful flight! (And whoever did the videography did a wonderful job keeping it in frame and in focus the entire time!)

MichaelRapp said:

How could one not want to do rocketry after watching that video?

Gorgeous rocket and wonderful flight! (And whoever did the videography did a wonderful job keeping it in frame and in focus the entire time!)

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You're right, that video was shot by Peter Abresch at MDRA. He shoots lots of rocket videos and always does a great job. Anyone who has tried it knows that it's not easy.

Mendal said:

Congrat Nathan, I just read through this entire thread. Just a little detail I might have missed. After the color was complete, it went to clear coats right? How many coats did you do of clear and what clear do you use? Would you talk a little more about your wet sanding, what grits are you using and what are you looking for before moving onto the next grit? I found this entire thread very helpful, thank you for taking the time to share your experience.

Mendal

Click to expand...

All the color coats and the clear coats are Restoration Shop lacquer from TPC Global. I sprayed 5 coats of clear. The clear coats were sprayed about 10 minutes apart.

Wetsanding is a very slow process. The purpose of wetsanding is to smooth out the slightly uneven paint texture that is unavoidable when spray painting, no matter how good you are. It helps a lot to get the clear coat down smooth with as little orange peel texture as possible. The smoother the clear coat, the easier the wetsanding will be. I first wetsand with 1000 grit. As you sand, the shiny clear coat changes to a dull matte finish. So as you are sanding and removing the the high points in the paint texture, you will have lots of small spots that the sandpaper hasn't reached yet, the lowest spots in the paint texture, which are still shiny. I like to get about 90% complete with the 1000 grit, which means that there is still about 10% of the lowest spots which haven't been sanded and are still shiny. I complete an entire section of rocket with 1000 grit like this. Then I sand the whole section of rocket again with 2000 grit, this time sanding until there are no shiny unsanded spots left, leaving a very smooth, even, matte finish.

After that you are ready for polishing. With polish you also need to do a two-step process. First you need to polish with a heavy cut polish (like rubbing compound), which is abrasive enough to take out the 2000 grit scratch marks. That should make it pretty shiny again but then to get the glass-like finish you need to follow up with a finer cut polish (like finishing polish).

You can see that with all of this sanding and polishing, you are removing a lot of the clear coat. That's why I spray 5 coats of clear. I probably remove about half of that. You definitely want to avoid sanding all the way through the clear coat. You need to be extra careful along edges of fins, where it is easy to apply too much pressure with the sandpaper.

Good luck!