My RV-8 Homemade Heat-Curing Box

Interior painting is quite a can of worms if you visit most of the sites for home builders.  A lot of opinions and experience to back up most everyone’s opinion: Should I use rattle can for interior? Should I use 2-part epoxy and gun? Should I just leave it alone?

Whatever the case, no matter what paint you go with, well cured paint will last longer than improperly cured paint.  Curing refers to the paint becoming harder due to the solvents (carriers) working themselves out leaving the parts that won’t evaporate behind.  That takes time but can be accelerated by using heat.

My work professionally in the Amazon rainforest with Mission Aviation Fellowship gave me a lot of day to day A&P experiences most don’t get here in the US.  We learned to make do with what we had at hand as there were no Walmart or Home Depot Aviation Departments.  We did a lot of painting as we touched up the planes, did minor sheet metal repairs and so on.  Add to that we didn’t use 2 part epoxy (ala Imron) unless we could mix up at least one pot and use it all.  Therefore often, we used rattle can paint for these small jobs.  It worked fine in a real world/production environment where safety came first.

But to do that in the rain forest where we got between 20-30 FEET of rain a year, we had to use heat boxes to cure the rattle can paint projects.  We often left them in these boxes over night.

That said, I needed/wanted to heat cure some of my small pieces from time to time to harden the rattle can paint and this was my $6/10 minute device.  The photo at left is of the tailwheel weldment for my RV-8 after spraying with Rustoleum Professional lt. gray primer and gray top-coat.

The point is, you don’t have to get fancy to get results.  Like Mr. Clark said when building one of his “devices” to use on the bad guys in Tom Clancey’s Without Remorse: “Good enough is good enough”.