the weight of a re-paint

[natedog74]

just wondering: with planes changing hands left and right with leases, sub-leases, wet leases, lease-backs, outright buys, ets, sometimes necessitating a complete repaint for new a/l livery - do they strip the old one all the way to metal? With hundreds of pounds of paint applied on big birds one would think so…

[Blacksheep]

It varies. Sometimes we do a complete strip & re-paint, other times we do a rub-down and respray and often its just a direct spray over.

With short leases it usually depends on the Lessee - they may have to pay for the paint job both ways (and if not, its factored into the lease price anyway) and often don't want to incur the cost of a complete strip down. Thats lots of manhours to pay for! Eventually you have to strip and repaint but its not undertaken lightly.

In the end you have to strip off paint when it gets too thick, if only to be able to do the structural inspections properly.

**************************
Through difficulties to the cinema

[avioniker]

For you trivia buffs out there, in 1992 at a repair station in the south of Arizona, after a complete strip, weigh, paint, and reweigh a DC-10 going from World to an African airline increased its weight by 2214 lbs.

[747FOCAL]

avioniker,

I think maybe they messed up weighing the plane before they started. :confused:

On a side note, most large aircraft are carrying a couple hundred pounds of dirt around. Wash a dirty 747 and watch it drop as much as 300 pounds. :\

[avioniker]

No goof.
It was a full fuselage and wing job.
USAF KC-10's, as I recall, picked up 1800 pounds on the "white tops" and over 2000 on the green planes. A further problem is that the green paint added an almost 2% fuel burn due to the rough finish.

[reynoldsno1]

ISTR that when the Nimrod went from the shiny white/grey to fuzzy hemp paint the fuel burn rose by more than 5%...

[PAXboy]

Does that mean that AA have good cause to stay with the polished metal?

I recall that NW designed their new scheme to save quantity of paint and, therefore, the application time. The tail plane is not fully covered by logo and top coats.

I have been truly amazed at the current fashion for wavy line designs. May I presume that they take longer to apply? Unless they are decals, of course?

[DanAir1-11]

digressing somewhat, I really would like to see the older established carriers revert back to their first liveries on a couple of aircraft, they could also bring back period uniforms for crews and make a theme of it??, it would be somewhat nostalgic I believe. (probably too costly in the current climate to even consider, but still something I would like to see one day!:O

[spadger]

Paint work approx 2.5 to 3.0 tonnes on 747 ive been told!

[LEM]

Somebody once told me that AA aircrafts are not really unpainted, although they look so, but are painted with some sort of protective transparent paint.

Curious to know if this is true :confused:

[DanAir1-11]

LEM,

From what I understand, (which may be tosh) they are just polished up with Wad-pol to get the skin to shine as it (usually) does. I don't recall there being any lacquers etc.

[avioniker]

LEM and DanAir
You're right, no paint except the stripes and composite areas.

[answer=42]

my grandfather told me that US airplanes in his day were unpainted except for around windows to save weight and thus fuel. And if you look at 50s liveries, this is true. So airlines (with the exception of AA) must have decided at some point that the weight / fuel saving was not worth the loss of advertising. Wonder if this was due to lighter weight paint, lower real fuel costs or better accounting.

answer=42

[GlueBall]

Irrespective of the weight of the paint, one technique used by clever maintenance crews is to install completely worn out brakes prior to sending the airplane unto the scales.

Depending upon the number of main wheels on your airplane, this can easily knock off an extra ton on the empty weight. Check out the size difference between new vs. worn out rotors.
:ooh: