Ugh…. just what you hate to see after the paint dries—fish eyes! This is the fiberglass top to the rear seat on the F1 Rocket (very similar to the rear seat back on an RV-4 or RV-8, or the pilot’s seat in an RV-3). After some fitting and fiberglass work to make it fit nicely, it was time to shoot primer and paint. Interestingly enough, the primer looked fine and the paint on the aluminum part of the seat back was perfect. But something was clearly wrong with the fiberglass!
This is a twenty-something year old fiberglass part that has been packed away all those years, but we suspect that there was some mold release of some type still on the glass, and I didn’t do a good enough job of cleaning and scuffing before going to the paint booth. At any rate, out came the sanders and off came this atrocious stuff. The second picture shows the final result after re-cleaning and repainting—nice enough to call it done! Truth is, as long as the cushion is in place, no one would have ever seen it but I’d know it was there, and would see it every time I took the seats out for maintenance.
Lesson learned? Suspect every fiberglass part of being contaminated, clean it and scuff it to within an inch of its life and if you don’t get the results you want, do it over.
