Its always interesting when people ask me about painting carbon fiber bicycles. They wonder if it can be done. The answer we give them is of course! We do it all the time and the results are always incredible. Last year we had the opportunity to paint Heather Jackson's Cannondale Slice. It was the bike she was going to ride in the Ironman Championships in Kona.
Heather's racing kit colors were a bright green and black. So we used PPG Deltron to come up with an amazing neon green. And this neon green won't fade. Using SATA Spray equipment's SATAminijet 3000 B HVLP spray gun made it easy to get smooth, even coverage. That gun has been redesigned and the results are mindblowing. I even used the Ladies Edition Minijet.
Heather had a great design, and I cut out the stencil on a Roland Plotter and used FBS Distributions Promaskers to get the job masked off fast! We had a brutal deadline on this job and we had to save minutes wherever we could. The ProMaskers are the best time savers in our shop! That's a SATAgraph 4 airbrush I'm using. Its a workhorse that can spray a fineline and it never lets me down. Its the best airbrush I have ever used.
Clearcoating the finished frame with a SATAjet Mini 3000 B. Man, it felt great to see this finished!
Here it is with the forks mocked up. Now it was ready to be packed up for shipping out to Heather! We put as mch care into packing our projects for shipping, as we do in painting them. The parts are wrapped in cotton flannel so keep that clearcoat pristine and then we wrap plenty of bubble wrap around the parts. Then they go into a box with lots of foam peanuts. We pack those boxes so survive almost anything, especially being dropped. We have over 20 years of experience shipping painted parts.
Here's a closeup of the artwork on Heather's bike.
Here's Heather on the road in Kona competing. She finsihed 5th! We also painted Heather's helmet. Got a bicycle you need custom painted? Send us an email and we'll happy to answer any questions! joann@crazyhorsepainting.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Come in, toss in your 2 cents.