Geoff Roberts Framebuilding course - first and second, and third frames. And fourth (now finished). And fifth.

So, colour coats. This bike is going to be my winter trainer, and is going to be fitted with mudguards and mudflaps. The mudflaps will be the new club mudflaps I helped organise, which are in the club colours of black, red and yellow. So I thought I'd do a colour scheme which is mostly black, with red highlights (a highly original colour combination for a MAMIL chariot) with hints of neon yellow, to match the club colours.

I also decided I wanted some boxlining type of things on the main tubes, which meant vinyl as I'm definitely not up to doing boxlining by hand quite yet. However, while I've sprayed a few bikes before such as the Dawes and my Planet X, I've always used vinyl decals either put on top of the clearcoat, or on top of the colour coat and underneath the clear coat. This time I decided to do things properly, and to use vinyl but only as a paint mask, and to do the decals and boxlining properly in paint.

So, I bought a little vinyl cutter (a Silhouette Cameo 2), some low-tack masking vinyl and application tape, and printed out my decals.

The ones with the 'Brommers' badge are for the downtube, the shorter ones are for the seat and top tube, and the roundels are badges for the headtube. Since the boxlining and decals are to be red, the first thing to do was the give the frame a coat of red paint:

and then stick the paint masks on:

Then apply the black colour coats, and carefully peel off the vinyl masks (my technique for this requires some refinement as there are a few little scrapes as a result of my efforts):

The result is far from perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the results:

My idea was to add a layer of red pearl on top of the colour coats, just to give the frame a bit of sparkle. In my mind's eye it was going to be a very subtle effect, only visible as a hint of red shimmer in bright sunlight.

It hasn't quite worked out like that. More to follow...