1. My painter had painted the white basecoat outline for the tail stars, so he had me come over and we hashed out the exact location for the stars, checkerboards, and the "nose number" on the lower cowl. We had a long discussion about how to determine "level," where the airplane's visual longitudinal axis is, and how we were going to paint the various insignias on the airplane.

Notes to anyone who's going to paint a Vans RV: Fuselage skins aren't always "level." Skins aren't always 90 degrees at the corners, You can't place graphics in a way that simply matches the nearby skin line -- you have to line them up with a common reference (whatever that may be) and EVERYTHING has to match that, or it will probably look funny.

We made a lot of conceptual progress on how we'll paint all the details.

2. I also reordered a couple of paint masks from Aerographics: The USAF "stars and bars" are a bit too big, so I'm downsizing them to 80% scale. Also, the nose number masks are currently two-part (One for the inner color and one for the and outlines) but this would make them very hard to use because you can't see through the masks and therefore can't easily line them up properly. The new ones I ordered will be single masks.

3. We installed the lower cowl so we could verify the position of the numbers and also check the level-line of the seam between the cowls. As I thought, it is exactly parallel with the canopy sill and the fuselage skin seam -- which are the de facto "visual level" lines on the airplane, whether or not they are parallel to the actual longitudinal axis or not.