I finally got the wheel pants back from the painter. He does good work, but not quickly. Unfortunately, I found a serious problem. Take a look at these, and compare them to the image below (Nov 2016). If you look at the cutouts, you can tell that these are not the same fairings. It turns out that my next-hangar neighbor had his RV-14 painted just after my 12 was done. Recall that my wheel pants were turned in for painting after the plane itself. It also turns out that since the wheels are the same size, so are the fairings. This means that both of our wheel pants were in the shop at the same time and—you guessed it—were painted the wrong colors and delivered to the wrong customer.
Steve (said neighbor) had Joe S (local A&P and fiberglass wizard) do the installation of the pants on the RV-14, so Joe didn’t realize that they weren’t what was already fit into place, he just fit my pants (painted white) onto Steve’s RV-14.
Chris said that the only thing to do was repaint both sets to be correct, and that’s what I thought had been going on for the last 3 weeks or so. Not. I ran into Steve a few days ago and my white pants are still on his RV-14. I just decided to hire Joe to re-fit Steve’s pants (painted in my colors) onto my RV-12 and be done with it. I’ll present the bill to Chris and see if he’ll pick it up (at least partially). I just want the damn things on my plane so I can be finally finished with them.
Steve’s wheel pants in my colors
my original wheel pants (now on Steve’s plane)
