To spuce up or restore?...that is the question!

When is a bike considered a custom? What is a rat bike? At what point do you cross a line between junk and simply "a clean old bike"? When does adding parts from other bikes and vehicles become ridiculous?

I love the straight old bikes with N.O.S. (new old stock) parts and ground up restorations. But if a bike show has the name "coucours" in it or includes caviar or champagne for refreshments, it ain't my bag. I don't like junk or animal furs hanging from things either, but I do appreciate creativity. I think most folks do too. I found both of these rat bikes on the Internet...hope the owners don't mind me using them.

So I needed to decide if I just wanted it to be funky or to have enough custom pieces on it to compliment an overall desired look. I love old, so I stuck with that theme. I also love the rat rod scene with the flat paint, rusted metal, retro decals, Von Dutch pin striping and wrapped pipes. So old with some of that mixed in was what I was after.

I scored a large upholstery hide on EBay for the seats for 99 cents. I've never done auto upholstery but my daughter knew how to sew, so I think I paid her a few bucks to do that. I won the 32 ford taillight ($8) and a luggage rack from an early 80's goldwing too (that was 99 cents too). I found some "dinky" marker/ turn signals on a clearance rack at Cycle World for $6.99. And though they are l.e.d. they look subtle, yet really light the place up when I want to make a turn. I found some bar end turn signals for the front for $19 a car horn for $12. I think I may add a marine dual trumpet 12 volt horn at a later date. But that needs to have a few dings, pits and rust in the crevices...sometimes new stuff takes away from the overall look. Then I stumbled on to a guy who had found a supply of NOS leather Harley mudflaps without the Harley logo. I bought three of those for around $3 a piece.

After making my purchases, I tore the bike down. The frame had
been painted brown (over the factory black) at some point in it's history so I knew I needed to take it back to black. Here is where I faced my first dilemma over how far I was going to go in either sprucing this thing up (cheap, cheap, cheap) or restoring it (engine pulled, sandblast, powdercoat, expense, expense, expense).

A restoration is like an onion. One restored layer leads to the next one...and so on. Fixing a bike up is making it look clean and functional, but stopping short of spending the big bucks. So I found tractor implement semi-gloss black paint in a bomb can, rattle can, (whatever) and shot the frame with that. It seems to be pretty tough, the semi-gloss hides imperfections and it comes with a fan spray nozzle to help you put on the smoothest coat possible. All I had to do was a little masking. And by the way, plastic trash bags are great for covering larger areas (engines, tires, etc.).

Just before I tore it down, I installed larger handlebars, but noticed that my new bar-end blinkers didn't quite fit. So my friend Don who owns an auto shop and restores vintage aircraft used his "Mega-Dremil" to grind out the ends and WE MADE THEM FIT! Making things fit is not a restoration...that's a spruce up. When you add things to the bike that weren't there in the first place, modifications become necessary. A restoration keeps things as they were intended to be. I don't like seeing ads about "restored" bikes that are really custom. Just call it what it is.

At this point in the blog, I haven't broken the news to Don that I plan to use spray cans for my paint job. He is one guy that I respect when it comes to restorations. One of the planes he restored is in a full color coffee table book of vintage war planes. This guy knows what he is doing.

I'm sure he'll understand, but what I am doing to this old beast doesn't hold a candle to the machines he restores...BUT LET'S REMEMBER, we're after cheap fun here! If money keeps you from riding that bike you want then maybe your taste is a little too uppity for your current budget. Start someplace and have fun. You can always spend more money later.

Now it is time to take the paint off the "tins" or in the case of the BMW, "tins and glass". The fenders are stock fiberglass and the tank is metal. Either way I want to remove as much paint as I can. The fenders have almost a gel-coat feel to the paint so taking it off requires sanding. I allowed some of the old paint to act as a primer since it was adhering so well. I did sand the edges down where the original pin striping had been so it didn't come through the final paint job. For paint removal, I used aircraft paint removal (spray can-Walmart) and scraped, sanded, resprayed, etc. etc.

Once I had the paint off and sanded down I made my repairs. I used lightweight Bondo on the tank to cover small dings and dents. On the fenders I first repaired the fiberglass before I used Bondo. Bondo doesn't bond two pieces together, it covers over a multitude of sins...that's all. So if there is welding or fiberglass repair to do, now is the time to tackle it. Then I took a good sandable black primer (I knew that the original color on the sidecar was black and I didn't intend to completely take all of it's paint off, so I wanted my base colors to all be the same...in this case, black) and shot the fenders and tank. I wet sanded everything after that and then repeated that process until I had it smooth.

Now with a solid primered and smoothed tank and fenders, it was time to choose a color for the top coat. I researched this because I was concerned about gasoline spillage on the tank. I'll have to be very careful when filling it with gas, but I still want a paint that will be as tough as possible. Then standing in a parts store one day, it occured to me..."ding" engine paint! It's tough, has some sort of ceramic in it and it is designed to withstand a certain amount of gas. Now all I had to do was decide on a color.