Lunchtimeprojects - modern steel road bike

Klein scheme with fade into flip colours?

Fading into flip doesn't really work in my experience, just detracts from the lairyness....

Id be tempted to just tell the painter to suprise you. If youre happy with all the work hes done previously whats the worst that could happen

Fabrication on this is done, bar front mech braze on I'm waiting to arrive.

@Turkish I think this is the best approach, he's quite excited by the prospect and has ordered some interesting things to try out...we're talking hollow flakes, uv reactive pigments

Just chose some colours, and let Euan do whatever he wants. You'll get the best job that way. Euan is a good painter, so he'll come up with something awesome for sure.

I'm a painter. and my best jobs are the ones where I get given some very rough ideas and told to do whatever I want.

I got waylaid by injury, work, life etc so dropped out of keeping this updated but I like having these little histories of bikes so will go through posting the rest of the process

You're right on the money, I also wanted him to do something he found interesting or would enjoy doing. After a bit of back an forth we decided on mostly white with black decals and some little bits of colour, I left the details up to him

Chainstays

Fit up in the jig, I decided to go with BSA after all!

Weld prep

Tacking

That bb stitch looks neat 👍 you do this a lot?

Everyday

Looks great. Thanks for sharing. It is really nice seeing how it is done. I take it you work for Shand? I have a lot of love for their bikes.

I am hoping to get into TIG very soon. Can you explain a bit about your settings and weld strategy?

I do, thanks, being around and building the bikes all day everyday you loose a bit of the enthusiasm and appreciation for them but mixing things up with these personal projects really helps keep the mojo.

Best of luck with the TIG, I've found it super satisfying to learn and would advise anyone starting out framebuilding to invest the time in that rather than filing fillets forever and a day. As far as setting go it's very much a personal preference thing, depend where you're at with learning. Strategy to my mind is more uniform but I'm happy to go into it if you'd find it helpful. I'll bring some notes home tomorrow

Welded and BB tapped for cable guide

Hand mitred brake bridge and small braze ons ready to go

Brazed, cleaned up (motivation for going full Ricky Feather lessens on personal bikes) and blasted ready for paint

Paint ended up being a long job with a few failed experiments along the way. I was keen to give the painter a chance to try some things he wanted to do, with the brief "white, black and a bit of colour"

He was keen to try out some UV reactive paints so we ordered some pigments that appear white unless in direct sunlight

The problem was that the paint booth is not in direct sunlight so he couldn't see what he was putting down, nor the concentration needed so many a lunchtime was lost on trial and error, spraying, running outside, swearing, sanding, spraying again etc. Also each layer required a white base coat so by the time there we got to applying the final white coat over the masks and all the layers of colour and base there was so much paint on the bike that the mask edges were super deep and some of the colours were bleeding because of the amount of solvent.

Fine by me but Euan wasn't happy to let it go so we flatted it off to start again. The resulting UV reactive "Rat-Rod" effect was amazing. Again I'm shouting "Graphics, clearcoat, Done!"

From there he started fresh with a white base coat, then the fades

At every step along the way "Graphics, clearcoat, Done!"

However I'm so glad I let him do his thing

Damn!!

Wow! Amazing end result

Ah, that was yours. Looks awesome.

That looks amazing! Great job on the build and paint.

Well I wasn't expecting that final paint job!

Something cool that might happen here; when you inevitably start chipping the paint, it'll ding and chip in the same colours as the surrounding details. Might look pretty cool when it starts to get patinated!

Well, well, well! Super cool. How many kgs of paint are on it? ;)

Wow!