The Lizzyville Coaster: Painting a Frame

Wanna know where I got all this junk?

Before even thinking of painting, I did two things to the frame. First, I removed the brake cable bosses from the top tube, reasoning that they were ugly and we didn't need a rear brake (which is patently wrong, as this is a coaster and thus has fore and aft brakes) [no one should ever say I'm smart] so I guess I'll have to zip-tie the brake cable housing to the top tube. Speaking of ugly. Second, I sawed off the rear deraileur hanger, as that's something we really won't need, and it makes the bike more symmetric.

Dremel tool use #1001: making irreversible mistakes faster than you can think them through.

So we've got a grungy frame that's 20-odd years old, and we want to re-paint it. How do we go about doing this? First, we need to clean the excess grease off, any of the variety of orange grease cutting products work fine for this purpose. Once we get it more or less clean, we start sanding. I used a combination of 150 and 220 papers. Here you can see the four different levels:
bare metal, the white primer, turquoise paint, and clear topcoat.

Yeah, I was pretty unhappy at this point with the lugged frame.

That's all well and easy for the straightaways, but the lugs and stays were a total nightmare. After about 10 hours of laborious sanding and swearing, I got the frame and fork more or less down to the original primer. I didn't want to go for bare metal all around, since I felt I might weaken the frame by taking off too much metal in some places.

An almost naked frame.

My primary concern is the long-term durability of the finish. Haha.

First I put on several coats of primer, then let it dry for a week. During the week, I went back to New York for school and stuffs. While there, I researched how to best put a durable layer of color on this frame. It seemed that the best solution is a baked-on powdercoat, which is more or less like the glaze on ceramics, and is super durable. The only drawback: very toxic, and oh, did I mention the need for a large oven? So I did the next best thing: automotive epoxy paint. They make low-temperature curing finishes, and the guys promised me it's the hardest spraypaint there is. Problem: still need a spraygun and air compressor. So, a trip to Sears covered that. The irony here is that the bike frame cost around $50, and the paint ended up costing $150, and the compressor and spraygun also cost a total of $150. At least now my mother can fill her car tires faster and with more precision than ever before thought possible.

Either I was "Ghostbusters" for Halloween, or I'm in way over my head.

Anyway, I went ahead and bucked conventional wisdom by doing the darker color (blue) first, since I wanted to do the logos on top in orange. Here's the first coat drying, so far so good.

This color is unofficially known as "masking tape blue".

I had a vague idea of how I wanted to do the logos. I was going to freehand transfer the logo from a printed image to masking tape, then use an exacto knife to cut the stencil out. Then, out of the blue, the logo changed.

Hahaha uhmm... oh eff.

Daunted but not discouraged (read: foolhardy), I went ahead and tried to do this anyway. Here's the stenciled masking tape, ready to be traced out with a knife.

I'm sure there was a better way to do this, and I don't want to know what it is.

It was by and large an unmitigated disaster. The loops of the L's, e's, and y's and z's were closed. My eyes also started to tear from the intense concentration during the cutting/tracing. Once those were cut out, I sprayed the second base layer of color.

I'd say this is more of a pumpkin orange.

I let this dry for four times the recommended hour, since I had some fine detail around the logos and I didn't want to peel off any paint when I removed the logo masks. Once I did, it came time to apply the final clearcoat, which is basically liquid epoxy to put a durable hard finish on the paint. Once I finished coating the frame, I had some extra left in the spray gun, so I decided Arches and Parmesean cats could use a "durable, weatherproof finish" and I clearcoated them. Kidding!

I'm clearly neglecting some other work doing all this.

Here's the final finished frame. Honestly, I goofed up a good deal, it's far from perfect. There are several epoxy runs because I didn't properly adjust the spraygun to account for the higher viscosity of the epoxy versus the base colors. I also make the mistake of painting the frame in too close proximity to the fork, resulting in a somewhat matte finish in some areas. due to they spray-off painting one on the other. Nevertheless, it was a good effort. Here are some detail shots.










Let's put it all together!