Still very impressed by Logan's paint job. What process did he use?
Thank you all for the compliments. I'm very proud of the job he's/we've done.
First step was obvious...strip the paint down to bare metal. Then we applied small, concentrated layers of Bondo to the few places where the tank wasn't perfect. In fairness, this tank was in pretty good shape, so there were only 6 places where we had Bondo applied to an area about the size of a silver dollar.
After sanding that down with 400 grit to where it felt fairly smooth to the touch, we would then hit it very lightly with 1000, 1500 and 2000 grit sand paper. A few told me this was probably too fine...but it worked for us. It took us about 6 or 7 applications in a few of those areas to get the area where you couldn't tell the difference with your eyes closed as your fingers went over the area.
Then, he painted it with 2 coats of Dupli-Color Self-Etching primer (the green color). After that, some of the repaired places could still be seen or felt through the primer so we applied another application or two of Bondo to those couple of places....sanded, etc. Then we had him spray another coat of primer over those. This time, we actually changed over to the Dupli-Color Sander/Filler primer because it filled in the little scratch or two that was caused by even the finest grit of sandpaper.
Once the primer was to the point we felt like it was as good as we were going to be able to get it, he sprayed 2 coats of the silver base coat that came as part of our kit from VMR. (By the way, we ordered the "Standard" kit....comes with 1 can of base coat, 2 cans of the Candy Gold, and 1 can of the Clear coat with Hardener once you activate it). We waited about 15 - 20 minutes between coats of each of those base coats and then he sprayed 3 light to medium coats with a 50% coverage overlap (recommended on the paint can) of the Candy Gold with a 15 minute wait time between the coats. After those had dried, we activated the hardener in the Clear coat and he sprayed 2 coats of that on.
The next day, we followed Cal's advice and tried to sand the clear coat to remove the orange peel but discovered we didn't really have the technique down. We tried varying degrees of sanding with varying grits of sand paper but it kept making what looked like a very cloudy or in some cases, even dark effect on the clear. We tried polishing a small area to see if that would remove the cloudy effect and it helped but didn't fix it. So we sanded it down lightly with 2000 grit and then sprayed another 1 coat of gold on top of that, followed by 2 final coats of clear. So there is some degree of orange peel if you look closely at the paint but we both decided we could live with that. After all, we have said all along we're going for a 6-foot bike....as long as it looks good at 6 feet, we can live with that!
Hope that explains what you're looking for, Nate.
