Custom Painted Helicopter Canopies

[heavymetal92]

Hi all I have a couple of questions for everyone, and I hope I get a lot of responses. Anyway here they are Ok if I were to have access to custom painted helicopter canopies how many of you would be interested in having a canopy custom painted? And what would you be willing to pay to have it done? The canopies themselves will be ordered depending on what your helicopter is. So in other words it will be guaranteed to fit. What I am doing is testing out the feasability of starting a custom painting business

thanks in advance

Joel

[Aztek1701]

Hi HeavyMetal

I think the answer to your question would be ... Id be interested, but it would depend on how much? and how custom?. The reason I say this is that there are a few companies now doing "custom" canopies... Canomod probably being the most notable of them. Also Align is getting in on the game for T-Rex canopies so there is competition out there and its growing. I for one would love to have a nice custom canopy however the downside of it is that in a crash, the canopy often gets thumped and if I have to pay say another $200.00 for a replacement, its a big offput to buying it in the first place. Saying that Id probably be prepared to pay for a canopy that was custom sprayed for me and possibly one thing that you could offer might be a "design assistance" service where the customer brings an you an idea, then you design it and bring it to reality. Im not aware of that kind of service being available easily yet. You might even be able to do some kind of Canopy template and masks that customers could download into a paint package to play with and return to you.

I hope I dont come across as sounding negative just trying to give a balanced opinion.

[uneverno]

I tend to agree with Azzy.

For the 450 size helis, there are many canopies available in the $ 20 - $ 100 range - the really nice ones at my lhs are around $70. That's a tough nut to swallow in a crash, where it will most likely get destroyed, and I can replace the entire bird for just over double that.

On the other hand, I think his design service idea is great. I have pretty weak skills with an airbrush, and even less drawing skills. Custom designed masks would be fantastic.

[Danzi]

Yeh well it all depends, if you can make one out of rubber/plastic material that can bend/flex well you could be onto a winner! In a crash canopies are one of the first things to go and totally obliterate them selves when it does happen, but if you can reduce that then, well that would be great@!

But painting wise? i have no idea