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Surface paint - is orange peel a bad thing?

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Built2Fly

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 21, 2020
Messages
157
Location
San Diego, California, USA
I am about to hand paint my aircraft. There are some gentleman on Internet and EAA webminar sharing his procedure of the painting aircraft with household latex paint. That looked intriguing and I am thinking about using the same method.

His paint looked beautiful. High gloss paint polished and buffed so smooth that it has a mirror like reflection. He mentioned that this polishing between the paint layers will reduce the orange peel unevenness with the paint, for better aesthetic.

That makes me wonder, is a mirror-like smooth surface a good thing for subsonic non-laminar flow surfaces? We know golf balls uses those dimples to create a turbulent buffer layers. And I read that buffer layer reduces drag by more than half. This has been studied extensively and proven working (and I believe that given how many millions of dollar go into that business). Would a bit of texture on wing surface give the same benefit? After all, people have been putting vortex generators on their wings to induce the air flow separation, right?

Does the paint on a low and slow homebuilt benefit from being a bit rough? What are your thoughts?

This is a picture of typical orange peel from painting a dry wall. Picture is from Internet.

orange-peel-texture1.jpg
 
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