Question for you polished guys

Grum.Man

Grum.Man

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Grum.Man
So I am looking at an airplane that is polished with painted stripes. How in the world do you keep the polished parts shinny without hurting the paint??
 
Point is that it’s a lot of work. Do you want to spend more time with a hand on a buffer than on the stick?
 
To renew the shine of a polished plane, you typically use a Cyclo buffer with very fine polish, like Nuvite S. If you run over into the paint a little, it isn’t damaged but you do have to do hand work with e.g. Nuimage cleaner to remove the polish from the adjacent paint.

Depending on whether the plane has polished or painted wings, you’re looking at 15-25 hrs of work with a Cyclo polisher, about once a year depending on environment. Polishing a plane by hand would take an eternity.
 
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Tusayan said:
To renew the shine of a polished plane, you typically use a Cyclo buffer with very fine polish, like Nuvite S. If you run over into the paint a little, it isn’t damaged but you do have to do hand work with e.g. Nuimage cleaner to remove the polish from the adjacent paint.

Depending on whether the plane has polished or painted wings, you’re looking at 15-25 hrs of work with a Cyclo polisher, about once a year depending on environment. Polishing a plane by hand would take an eternity.
Click to expand...

Pretty much what he said, though the 25 hours would be high for my almost-all bare metal plane.

I will add there is a difference between polishing and burnishing. Nuvite S and similar "polishes" actually "burnish". With burnishing there is no cutting involved. Hence no damage to the paint, or in my case, vinyl.

I can do a quick burnish on my plane in about an hour, wings and all. Pus about 2 more hours to clean the dried polish off the plane. Cleaning up is the harder part.

The annoying part of a polished airplane is all the marks it picks up from normal usage. It does not stay in that post-polish perfection very long. Fingerprints, scuff marks, water stains and bug stains have a never-ending way of marring the finish. And my plane lives in a hangar.

People say my plane looks stunning, but all I can see is all the imperfections in the finish.

Conversely, I have a friend with a homebuilt painted plane that lives outside and rarely gets washed. Every time I look at the plane, the d*** thing looks perfect! I'm not sure if it's just perception and he "sees" his plane as dirty.
 
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Nuimage removes fingerprints and bugs etc from a polished surface without leaving oily residue. It works if you get them before a stain forms, maybe going over the plane a little after every flight.

Polished planes look fantastic but take a commitment. My polished Luscombe with painted wings took 14 hours, once a year or so. There was a lot more surface area to polish than many might expect. About an hour of that was cleaning the fabric wings after Cyclo work was done. If you were to do the same job on (for example) a Cessna 195 with polished wings, you’re looking at a lot more time. The bottom of the wings is tough work.
 
I'm a fan of doing it in sections, over a period of time, rather than trying to do it all at once. That and doing regular wipe downs with a good waterless cleaner keeps it shiny a long time.

Of course, when you have coworkers who want airplane rides, there's another way getting something out of it without running afoul of 61.113.
 
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