Kiddies don't try this at home!

LAST EDITED ON Jul-30-04 AT 11:03 AM (CDT)
 
Hot plate with pot of watter. Open can of dope setting in it. Leave enough room in dope can for expanshion!(Thats the tricky part as if it boils over FIRE!)Bring watter to boil. Remove dope can platisize it add thinner spray upside down. It does add bonding agents back in. But thinner evaporates. You are painting the plane from the bottom side using gravity to make paint stay on top of covering. All you trying to achive is an elavated state of heat in the paint for quick flash time.

And please before you POO POO it try an experment with it it works.

The late Tom Wardens planes were all painted in this manner. His finish's were all top of the line!! If any one has seen his workmanship you would be impressed!

Be careful!!!!!!!! Very Dagerous

Spark: I am going to pass on this one. Currell

Currell, I am going to run a trial on this. I will take two specimens and treat one with heated dope and one with normally treated dope just without heating.
Maybe not today, but after our contese this next weekend Aug 7 & 8.

Bigiron

LAST EDITED ON Jul-30-04 AT 11:24 AM (CDT)
 
Remember to do a piece big enough to get a good reading. About the size of a wing . Build a square using 1/4 inch balsa and cover with silkspan. Then paint accordinly. Please be careful I cant't express that enough!! DO NOT DO THIS IN YOUR KITCHEN! BIG FIRE HAZARD!!!Just ask Chris Mcmillin what Tom's kitchen looked like.

Living here in Nevada, I put the dope can outside in the hot sun (102 deg.) with the lid on but loose and in 20 minutes it's hot and ready to go and I think much safer. This also seems to thin it out a little and no blush with the low humidity of 14%.

I used to live at the Salton Sea where it was ideal. You have to admit painting is easyer there.

LAST EDITED ON Jul-30-04 AT 11:59 AM (CDT)
 
Heating varnish makes sense, not dope. I just thin mine out a little so it will brush on, add plasticizer and paint the wing from the bottom, holding it over my head. This is especially crtical with "saved foam" wings. As to 14% humidity in Sparks, must be a rainy day. In Lovelock is was usually 10%.
Just want to add that painting or doping on clear from under the wing is not a new idea. This is how I was taught back in the early 50's. Just enough dope goes into the weave of the silk to fill it, but the rest remains on top and fills quicker, ergo, less dope, less weight. Same for silkspan. Two guys in my club saw me doing this and thought I was NUTS. Yep, but not insane.

I seem to remember reading that Tom's ceilings had dope on them.

I have a couple of questions here. If we are adding thinner after the fact, aren't we cooling off what we already heated up? And what kind of dope was being used in this process? Some of the old Aero Gloss and Testors and even SIG variants were rather slow drying. Not the new Brodak. The person you are referring to (and probably you, yourself) have never tried the presently available product.

I can understand that heating dope will make it flow easier and also dry quicker. Might work with some of the older, runny (too thin) dope. You boil off some of the thinner, then heat it to make it flow. Quicker drying. But if the dope is properly formulated and you use quick drying thinner, you accomplish the same thing. And if you are painting in conditions where the drying time needs to be slowed down, you are going counterpurpose.

If your dope is already too thin, you can just leave the lid off the can (or jar) for a while. You don't need to boil it. Even if it skims over, this can be stirred up and it will all disolve again.

But it sounds a bit like the guy saying, "Use a stock LA 46. Don't change a thing!" I have to ask "What venturi was yours supplied with?" (at least 6, maybe 7 different sizes were supplied with these things with no indication on the box or the instructions that this was so.) What dope are you using? What thinner are you using? How thin is the dope before this is tried? These are all pertinent questions to be asked...and answered.

It still smells like trying to fix a bad batch of dope, and certainly not a catch-all solution as in "take any brand and do this".

LAST EDITED ON Jul-30-04 AT 08:27 PM (CDT)
 
I have heard that brodack Dope is a Randolf product? If this is the case it is the same thing we use to use. We got it form El Monte,CA Airport. Real aircraft dope. When I was in the Navy. AMS at N.A.S. Mirimar CA. Corrision control crew VF211 71-74. ( by the way I might add the squadren paint sceam in mine I won a contest and got 3 day leave for it. Good thing to have model airplane experince, Red ,white and blue)The had the same dope there. Not that we used dope on F14s But none the less we had it there.It was thick. Although the had a real nice Doped finished F4U there on dispaly. Heating the dope as I stated before makes it dry on top of the covering.

Ok, One question

If the fabric is fully filled and you have at least 6 to 8 coats of a base clear on top of the fabric, does the none heated colored dope sink into the clear?

Where is my hot plate? Let me try this and I believe i'll move it over by the GAS hot water heater, where the lighting is better!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM, Next day the paper reads, "Control line flyer if found laying out in the street". "Friends put out flames".
When the friends were interviewed, "They exclaimed, that he was trying to make a great fininhing system better, or something like that!

I am sorry but this adaptation of a fine product is well worth a Darwin Award.

Yes, but that doesn't mean it's identical to the stuff Randolph sells under their own brand.

I do not understant it at all. If you need quicker dope, why do not you use quicker dope, why you use slow and you try to boil it???

Just use another brand or type and that is ... ???

warming the paint is an old trick for many solvent-based paints. The mix thins from heat and then quickly sets up when it hits a relatively cold surface. The effect is different than thinning the paint with a quick flashing solvent. You'd probably get the best results with a relatively slow drying dope. Warmed it would spray and flow out before it thickened back up, and then it could dry normally.

Warming can also help enamels(look at the procedures for Rustoleum rattle cans), and even polyurethane clear.

If you use an electric hotplate with the water bath, use reasonable amounts of paint(half a pint or so), and do the heating outdoors on pavement there is nothing particularly dangerous about it. You spill a lot more dangerous solvent at the gas station when the autocutoff doesn't work and the nozzle splashes half a cup of gasoline on your pants.

There are much better tricks in modern dope systems. For example you can have two component system with thinner. The basic dope does not leak well even not set yet. It is "wet" but plastic stuf. Only the thinner allows leaking and soaking. It allows to make quickly or slowly reactive dope base (those two components) and qickly or slowly evaporating thinners. I use slow setting (gives time for application) and quick evaporating dope (not allowing leaking) for basic color layer allowing to put one layer spraing. The trick is, that thinner evaporates quickly leaving stuff which does not leak anymore, but next drop of dope coming from gun can still "melt" surface which is still wet, just not leaking. It keeps cosistency without leaking even thick layer. So after all you need only one layer of color dope. I do not reason for such "alchymistic" methodes

I have tried Sig Dope right out of the can and it dries so fast it streaks and the wing is full of brush marks. I tried fast dry and slow dry thinner and slow dry seems to work best it gives the dope a change for gravity or what ever to make the brush marks go away on their own before it dries but my airplanes that are painted with dope all look like hell. I don't know what the trick is to get a nice mirror finish with dope. I have put a can of car paint from Auto Zone in a pan of hot 150 deg water to warm it up and painted an airplane with it and the heat makes the solvent leave very fast. Normally I have to wait 5 minutes before spraying a 2nd coat of paint to keep form getting runs but the heat makes the solvent leave real quick and recoating can be done in a minute or so. It still takes 24 hours for the car paint to dry and the finish is excellent.

>I have tried Sig Dope right out of the can and it dries so
>fast it streaks and the wing is full of brush marks. I
>tried fast dry and slow dry thinner and slow dry seems to
>work best it gives the dope a change for gravity or what
>ever to make the brush marks go away on their own before it
>dries but my airplanes that are painted with dope all look
>like hell. I don't know what the trick is to get a nice
>mirror finish with dope.

One important tip is to not use a brush. It needs to be sprayed.

If you really want to know how to get a good dope finish, get Windy Urtnowski's tapes on the topic.

This technique was well documented in Tom Warden's 1971 MAN Article about the Continental. One thing to note however is that this just applies to the first one or at the most two coats of clear. Once it is set so that no other dope can penetrate underneath then you are done with the heating of the dope. Excellent sources of finishing infomation are all of Windy's finishing, and buffing tapes as Brett said in the previous post. A good source of trim design information is Claus Makis's articels in past Stunt News magazines. Also, just looking at pictures of other planes can give plenty of ideas about trim design.