Well DH82EH, I took your advise and got to work.
I had a very busy two weeks with lots of sanding and lots of inhaling fumes, but we came out with a beautiful paint job that I am very happy with.
We first started by building the largest fort that I have ever seen to protect the hanger from overspray. It took 350 ft of plastic and lots of tape. It worked rather well with no traces of blue on the hanger floor. We used PPG Desoto paints for the flat uniform look, overall nonspecular Sea Blue and the stars and bars in Insignia Blue and Insignia White. Before you critique the star you must know that it is an exact copy off of BU 55404 out of lake Michigan, from the size, points, and application method. After everything was nice and dry we applied all of the stencils, rolling them on with Insignia White. I held off on the final squadron markings as I would like to do them in a slightly different white and maybe even spray them out in the wind like they would have on the carrier. So for now we have a bone stock, just rolled off of the assembly line look. Grumman "and General Motors" were good about corrosion prevention, any chance to add another coat of protection was taken. In short they would pretty much assemble everything and then give it a nice heavy coat of paint. The wing folds have a little bit of exposed hardware and unpainted flex tubing but not as flashy as most warbirds today.
The last few pictures are some of the engraved panels that I built today and the removable GPS/COMM/TXP panel that we will have for everyday flying. There will be no "new" antennas on the exterior of the airplane. COMM will use the original mast antenna, GPS will use a removable antenna that sticks to the armor plate via magnets, and transponder will use a small antenna that can thread into the ARR-2A antenna mount located on the belly.
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