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BD5J Canopy Tint


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We have a fleet of BD5J jets and, in the past we had somebody tint our plexiglass canopies and he did an amazing job. He no longer is around, we did find a 2nd guy who tinted these and he did not do nearly as well, we have ripples and bubbles whereas, the other guys job was flawless. I do understand that there is much difficulty in tinting plexiglass, not to mention a compound curve. I know that it can be done on these canopies as we have 2 with flawless application. We have tried getting someone else to do the tint however, when we bring the canopy in we are told that they won't do these. So after having exhausted our possibilities of someone else doing we decided that as a R&D co. we would attempt these ourselves. That worked awesome on the first strip, we are having problems adding strips after we get the first one down, and the first strip is a pain (as in 2 hr long pain).

 

The tint we are using has gold flakes which reflect radar in all kinds of different directions giving us a small radar signature. This is critical to our success as we do not  have the option of switching to another substance as the test for the radar reflectivity is prohibitively expensive (several $100,000).

 

I would appreciate some help from the professionals out there who have success in plexiglass and compound curves. We are in Tucson AZ, but we keep the planes stored in our A/C controlled shop so there really isn't much sun exposure, only when we are flying do we get exposure.

 

Pictures of the canopies: The one that is not on the plane is our current project, the tan and brown plane is the flawless job, the silver plane is the one that has flaws in it.

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