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Comprehensive response as ever.
On a separate note, I’ve got a CAAD7 Saeco. The dark red candy clear over brushed aluminium. I’m hopefully picking up a CAAD5 track frame in the next few weeks/months. How possible would it be to strip, brush and copy the Saeco candy clear coat over the raw metal on it?
PhilDAS-
Quite doable lad.
Quite doable indeed.Your main expense here would be having the frame chemically stripped as opposed to being blasted. Blasting of most kinds will alter the surface of the metal. Uniformly of course but it will still appear dull... you need some kind of consistent shine for candy to be effective... that's why in most cases, candy will go over silver or gold (or oddly, gloss black).
Are you after just the candy red or the original branding too?
general_greyharbour
Paint itself isn't strong really.
Good clearcoat, applied well is the best way to defend your colours/graphics.
Clearcoats are on a spectrum... at one end, they are flexible but prone to scratching and at the other, they're more resilient to scratching but can chip.
Painters are not agreed on the best clearcoat products.
We import ours from America where the rules about the ingredients are a little different and we think we have one of the toughest available.
Most painters will clear multiple times but, ask you painter for an additional 'flowcoat'.
This means that once your bike has clearcoat, it is wet sanded and a further clearcoat is added over the top. It'll be tougher, and shinier when polished.
I wouldn't recommend hammerite for a resilient finish on a bike per se.
Strictly speaking, it's not JUST the paint product that needs to be robust... more importantly, the bonds between the frame and the primer need to be excellent and then the bonds between the primer and the paint product need to be strong too. What use is a good paint product if you can scrape it off with your keys?
The strongest finish we can offer at Cole Coatings Workshop is something we affectionately refer to as 'rubble'. It's a U-Pol product designed to line the flat beds of trucks... specifically made to have tools thrown at it and defend against solvent and chemical spills.
It does look a bit like Hammerite but it's a far superior as a product. We apply it over an epoxy primer (as opposed to a more common etch type primer for example), this is a high build product, quite robust in itself. The 'rubble' product can be tinted to any standard RAL colour and if performed inside a tight curing window, we can also add additional graphics over it.
I have it on my own personal bike... https://www.instagram.com/p/BWCmuAlFKPD/?taken-by=private_patterson
There's a Quirk MTB leaving the shop shortly that has this finish in a deep blue, with pink graphics.
The product is pretty savage in terms of being messy to apply. It ruins our booth filters and you have to fully strip and rebuild your guns afterwards (as opposed to simply running thinners through them). With that in mind, what we try and do is pool a handful of these projects and hit them in one go in order to save on the cost of cleanup.
This may be too short notice for you BUT, we are having a rubble day this week so if you were ready, you could potentially hop on the back of the job and pay a cheaper fee. Drop me an email via the Cole Coatings Workshop site?