I've noticed (having just painted a bike last week) that the modern iteration of this "candy" paint takes a VERY long time to dry. It's been 8 days and I can still smell some fumes in the garage where the parts are awaiting decals, etc. This seems much longer to me than anything I painted with before 2010 (which was the last previous bike repaint I did).
Was this catalyzed Candy paint? If yes it should be 99.9 percent cured in 24 hours.
I hope you cleared over the candy as most modern candy paints are not UV resistant and will fade right away even under florescent lights.
On the CB350F I just painted Flake Matador Red ,2 coats of clear was immediately applied over the candy. Waited 24 hours then sanded with 800, applied decals then applied
ore.more coat of clear.
Yep, it is a catalyzed paint type, something new for me. I ended up forced to wait 4 days after the basecoat because of Colorado's typically unpredictable weather: about 5 minutes into the primer painting, a high wind broke out, flying pollen, leaves and bugs across everywhere. It dropped some cottonwood seeds into the paint right on top of the tank, and the 40+ MPH wind was blowing away the 5 PSI spray from the gun, so I got to wait almost 7 days before the reapplication of the primer [again] after sanding out all the damage. True to form, as I laid the last primer coat and mixed up the first basecoat, another wind cranked up, bringing bugs, seeds and more cottonwood, all 3 which ended up in the basecoat. Then 6 more days later, after sanding out all that, I got the basecoats back on and the 1st of the 2-layer gold (labelled "Basecoat"), all 3 layers of that to get it wet. Then it turned to wind and rain while I was cleaning the gun for the gold topcoat, no more painting. Then, just 9 days later, we got a still, quiet afternoon and I got the 3 top coats and the clearcoats on it. It never took me a month to paint a set of sidecovers and a tank before, and I still have to do the black panels and the decals on the tank. Man, do I miss lacquer...
Looking at my old pictures of my CB500 and other CB550s I worked on in their days, they did not appear to have clearcoat over the black panels: the panels are distinctly less glossy that the candy color on the tanks in the pix. So, I'm doing this one that way: I thought I remembered them looking like that, and the old pix appear to confirm it. The decals also used to chip, leaving the paint undamaged, when zipper-legged leathers (like mine) were dragged across them during chaotic pits stops: my tank bag did that to my 750, too, where the plastic strap clips rested right on the stripes: they were not clear-coated over, either.
I'll study how it looks in the end, compared with those pix.
