Dome Panel Touch-Up at Mike's

Yesterday I mentioned that one of droid #1's dome panels had a flaw in the recently applied clear coat. Mike Senna had some fresh clear coat that was otherwise going to go to waste, so I took advantage of the opportunity to bring the panel over for recoating.

One of Mike's droid's legacy leg-cutout pieces served as a paddle to hold the panel.



I started applying the clear coat, but I immediately noticed that the problem wasn't going away, and instead, was causing a cloudy appearance in the area I had lightly sanded and prepped yesterday. I abruptly stopped the application.



Mike took a look, and suspected that some of the Duplicolor blue had been sanded, and suggested we reapply a light layer of it, and then re-clear coat on top of that. Mike offered to do that, and I took him up on the offer.



The blue now looked uniform.



We waited an hour, and then Mike reapplied the clear coat



Once it had sufficiently cured, I replaced the panel back on the dome back home. Much better!



Hopefully that's the last of the clear coat concerns, forever.

Prepped Dome Panel for Clear Coat Touch-Up

I noticed that one of the panels on droid #1's dome has a bit of a defect in my application of the clear coat I performed recently. It looks like there is a little bit of bubbling just above the reflected light.



I've decided to try to fix this. The plan is to lightly wet-sand this with 2000 grit sand paper, with some dish wash liquid added to reduce the abrasiveness.



I did my best to only sand off the clearcoat, and avoid sanding into the Duplicolor blue layer just below it.



After sanding, I applied a little bit of dish wash liquid as a pseudo-clear coat to see if things still looked ok. It seemed that the color was retained.



Tomorrow I will go to Mike Senna's house for the clear coating. He was using a can of Spray Max 368 0061 and expects to have some extra in the can, that will expire in about 48 hours anyway. That panel just needs a few square inches of coverage.