spray.bike Dolan Pre Cursa (looks great from a distance!)

Hey riders!

First time posting a project as I gathered enough footage and story behind it.

Have been riding a Volume Cutter as my main city companion for a while, and even though I love the looks and how much beating it can take, it feels a bit heavy/slow and also a bit small for what I like. So decided to return to my favourite beater frameset, a Pre Cursa! Now, after I didn't find a rogue 60cm black frameset on here/eBay, decided to order one from store. However, a few changes happened very shortly after my order was placed:

1) They notified me that they actually ran out of 60cm black framesets, so will send a grey one - although I think it looks fantastic, it's just not my cup of tea
2) I was put on furlough by my firm so had a lot of time on my hand
3) This lot of time also translated into scrolling Instagram more and discovering spray.bike's page

So this prompted me to sand down a beautiful factory paint (lol) and put the creation of my own imagination on it. Most of the components will be from my current build, and are black/chrome. Originally, I really wanted to paint the frameset Van Halen stripes (just look at my avatar), being a huge fan, but figured if I go through the process, might as well put something original on it. Wanted a lighter coloured bike, really like the milan blue from pray.bike as well, so decided to do a kind of "digital" or "pixelated" transition between white and milan blue, and cover with gold keirin flakes for the bling. BLB didn't have the gold flakes so settled with the purple, #yolo.

Didn't have to clean or de-assemble much at the start:

Sanding went in 6 stages with 6 different paper grades: 60-100-240-400-800-1200.
I wanted to leave most of the original paint on for extra protection, and not sand down to bare metal. Pictures from the first sanding and last sanding:

After getting it cleaned up, masked, sprayed the first layer of white which was pretty even and steady in my opinion, and had lots of fun (first time can-spraying a bike). Left the headtube raw as that's where the milan blue will go.

Then spent an hour or more putting the masking on for the transition, which involved thin lines of masking tape as parallell as possible and with increasing density of blue towards the headtube. Now, I wanted to do this design for both the downtube and toptube, but not gonna lie, lost my patience to do the top tube, so just put random lines there. Plus, the downtube design was really difficult to get it as nicely as I could, so didn't want to screw up twice. Can't see much, but this is how it looked:

Aand the milan blue didn't disappoint, it's very hard to photograph it nicely, but in person it's so pretty:

I wasn't sure when to remove the masking to nut leave it too runny but also not pull up flakes if it's too dry. So decided I'll have some dinner as I barely ate due to the hard day's manual labour.

As I pulled the tapes off, some parts I was really satisfied with, some parts not so much. Buts of blue paint sneaked under the tape and mixed with the glue to give this bit of residue and not nice sharp lines. So that's probably sloppy sticking from my part. Also the design is definitely not as clean or parallel as I hoped, but that's due to my inaccuracy and the under-estimated difficulty of the task. Here how it looked at the end of the day: