Repaint - and thin no more!

I finally decided on the color. G.M. #1608 engine block blue! I was going back and forth on the color scheme and I saw an old Volkswagen (keeping with the German theme...well okay sort of) and I thought maybe I could find a color close to that. Well it was close, but not exact. But I like the overall outcome. I like bright colors if they're tasteful, simply because the brighter colors catch other driver's eyes quicker...at least I tell myself that. The engine block colors actually offer a wide variety of "vintage" hues that can almost, in some cases, come off looking pretty "period" to certain bikes. You might want to check them out.

But here is a warning. I have discovered that most auto part stores stock only 2 cans of each color. I bought each lot of 2 cans at most of the stores. If you want G.M. #1608 in Nampa, Idaho, you may want to wait a few weeks, there isn't any more available! The paint is pretty tough, it offers a nice gloss with careful prep and spraying and it should hold up to the elements as long as I take care of it and keep it clean and waxed. Here is how some of the pieces turned out.

The shot of all the pieces together was after I painted the trim color and striped it but you can see how it ended up. Now I must warn the average painter, spray cans do not offer the same quality that a paint shop (a person who does it for you with a professional spray outfit) offers. But what I ended up with is a 10 foot paint job. At 10 feet away, it looks pretty good.

But you still don't get this quality if you just shake a can a few times and start spraying a tank like a hairdresser would spray aqua-net all over Grandma's new Saturday hair do. No, you have to read the instructions and actually follow them. With this particular type of paint, it required that all the coats be sprayed within 10 minutes of each other and all within an hour. I didn't read that closely at one point and had to go back and remove some paint accordingly.

The other thing you have to do, besides putting on a mask and making sure the place is well ventilated, is you need to patiently work from left to right making smooth, even strokes that keep the can about 6 inches away from the item being painted, consistently. Your lighting is crucial too so that you can watch the reflection and see the dull spots. When you make a pass and can see the gloss in the light, you go back to the left and make another one just under it, making sure that you don't leave a dry band of paint in between the two glossy ones. If you do, you quickly come back and double wet coat that dry band (you are spraying in between the two glossy bands over the dull one at this point) so that it blends in with the glossy ones before they begin to set up. It takes patience, but it isn't that difficult. And best of all...IT'S CHEAP! We like cheap.

After I coated everything with several light coats I let it dry. Several light coats may seem to be a waste of time initially. My tendency toward impatience makes me want to lay on a heavy, glossy coat the first time. The problem with that thinking is that in order for the paint company to make a can that can actually deliver paint, they must thin it down considerably. Because it is thin, when you put it on thick, IT WILL RUN. So as any good prophet worth his salt would tell you, REPAINT! (or is that repent?...who knows).

Runs are not uncommon though. That's why patience is required. On an enamel based paint, after 2 or 3 days you can wet sand the runs out and any other little boogers...like the boogers with wings that will fly into your new paint job to get a closer look. After you've wet sanded them with a very fine paper, you simply respray with several light coats again.

I had to go to Hawaii...okay, got to go, so I rushed to finish the tins before I left. My wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary in Kona and I knew that I couldn't touch the bike for 8 days so I wanted to use that as a curing time. I must confess that I thought about the bike while I was there. One night as we were drifting off to sleep and my eyes were staring off in some direction, my wife said, "you're restoring your bike right now aren't you?" Got me. Yes I painted and pieced this thing back together several times in my mind before I actually did it so that when it came time to actually do it, I had already thought the process out. And frankly, though I was having a great time (a bad day in Hawaii is better than most good days at home) I missed the ol' beast. I kept thinking how great that bike would have been to cruise around the island on.

Well, there you have it. A spray can job can turn out. I used more engine block paint (Cummin's diesel tan) for the trim, but didn't notice that it was a semi-gloss. Double check the sheens on the paint before you make your purchase to make sure they are consistent. I was disappointed, but after a while, I decided to stay with it because it gave it a bit of a contrast like the stripes on some of the early muscle cars. So I left it alone. The following pictures will show some of the process of laying down the trim color.

Now, please remember, this is a spruce up, not a restoration. So after the trim is painted on (by the way, I used very thin vinyl masking tape for this because it keeps the color from bleeding underneath the tape and it gives you a really nice clean edge) I decided that it needed a third contrasting stripe. I didn't want to use vinyl pin striping, because that would take away from the over all look. But I had never used a pin striping brush before. Do you know that all experts started someplace? There is always a first engine rebuild, a first piano piece, a first web-site, a first this and that. If you want to learn how to pin-stripe, what better place to learn than on a $40 paint job rather than a $400 or a $4000 one? I'll tackle that in the next blog.You can see the gloss that can happen after carefully prepping, wet sanding and painting with a double wet coat method. You can also see Daisy watching me, wondering why on such a sunny day we can't go out cruising in the sidecar. Soon Daisy, very soon.