Fork Tubes Repaint

[delsol]

This was supposed to go to "What have you done to your bike today" thread, 2nd time today this has happened , mods can you move for me pls ? ta

Decided to tidy up the paintwork on the fork tubes as I had disassembled the forks for a service anyway.

Fork tubes (particularly left side - owing to L plate mounting fitted by previous owner scratching and gouging the surface) had enough marks and scratches making the bike look a bit scabby.

Colour match compared to mudguard not great, fork tube is alloy, mudguard is plastic, is that part of of the reason for mis-match ?

Paint was colour matched (using bike label colour code) by local reputable automotive paint supplier, so not sure I can blame them.

Well, not perfect but looks a lot better than it did, need to practice more

Hopefully you can zoom in on the pics to see gouges on fork tube.


Instead of using cataloy type fillers on a couple of the deeper gouges I tried epoxy putty to see how it would work out over time, a little experiment. The epoxy putty is tough enough and can be filed and sands down quite easily, I'm just not sure how good the bond strength to alloy tube is, time will tell.

[stickybackbob]

The reason for the mis-match in colours can be down to a few things;

Different colour primer can result in a different colour top coat.

Not all clear lacquer is truly clear (most are very pale yellow, some are more blue.

But the biggest difference is usually caused by the metallic element of metallic paint. Getting the particle size exactly the same from batch to batch is virtually impossible and this causes us to see shade differences