One of the first things anyone notices about an aircraft is the paint. In my days as a customer liason for two OEMs, the paint job often set the tone for the final delivery of the aircraft. If the paint looked good, without orange peal, pinholes, drips and runs, we were off to a great start. Sherwin-Williams Aerospace Coatings is continuing to offer tools and support to help achieve the best result possible from their products. "We don’t just ship cans and say, ‘Good luck!’" says J. Marc Taylor, director of sales for Sherwin-Williams. "We have an awesome technical service department. We are in the hangars, doing it with the customer. We are with them every step of the way."

One way they are helping is with a 15-minute video released last fall, "Aerospace Coatings: Proper Application Techniques." The video, produced by Sherwin-Williams Aerospace Coatings, offers detailed directions and tips for preparing and applying aircraft coating systems to better ensure a high-quality outcome. Sherwin-Williams uses this video in its own training seminars and is now making it available to customers. By taking aircraft painting crews through surface preparation, primer application, surfacer/primer application, topcoat application, safety and various equipment and facility requirements, the training video provides an overview of the painting process, from start to finish. Although short and basic, this video would be a great introduction to help anyone understand the complex, time-consuming process that is painting an aircraft. It would be valuable to assist all types through the process, even picky customers.

Another new set of tools is the design-oriented fan deck, color cards and swatch binder. These items give designers a convenient method of choosing and presenting coating color schemes for commercial and general aviation aircraft. The new system includes color cards, fan decks and a binder filled with cut-off color swatches. Samples included with these new tools are more accurate than any other previous versions. Past color samples had a Mylar film on top to emulate the glossy finish. The new chips are covered with an actual clearcoat for more accurate representation. All paint samples in the new kit are produced with the same lot of material to provide an exact match.

"Plane owners in the past were selecting the paint for their aircraft on small 1 x 1-inch samples. Now, the customer can see a large sample," says Julie Voisin, aerospace marketing manager. For more information about these items go to www.swaerospace.com. — Joy Finnegan, Editor