Sunday, December 20, 2009

Fresh Paint

I'm still in the process of fixing up my mountain bike. I talked to a local auto body shop a couple weeks ago and they agreed to paint my frame but are booked until after the first of the year, So, I decided to paint the frame myself just for fun. I still plan to have it painted by the pros, but I wanted to see what kind of paint job I could produce with spray paint from a can. I'll tell you that the prep work took twice as long as the actual painting. I sanded and sanded the frame to get rid of all the chips in the paint, all manual no machines here. Below is a pic of the frame during the prep. I didn't take it all the way down to bare Al, that would have taken me forever and with the frame going to the auto body shop soon I decided to sand, prime and then paint. I'll let them sand blast the frame.

To be honest, the paint job turned out a lot better than I thought. I have logged many hours spray painting and I am better than average with the rattle can, but this is by far the best paint job I have done. The indoor pics don't do it justice, there's a lot of flake in the paint and it sparkles in the sunlight. Not bad for $22 and about 8 hours of labor.
On the training front things are going as planned. A few rides and a few runs per week, nothing major planned until late January and the first race is the last weekend in February

No comments: