Monday, April 25, 2016

We Custom Paint Bicycles!

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








Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Whats New!!

Its been a long time since I posted here on this blog, but there's been a whole lot going on. I'll be posting every week, trying to catch you all up on the wicked cool projects  that are coming through the shop. One thing we did, we built and painted a totally badass 1967 Firebird. Check out that purple color. The car looks black but the sun hits it, it lights up purple! I love painting real fire flames, so of course I had to paint them on our shop car! And we get a lot of comments on the Rocket Booster Wheels and the Coker Redline Tires. I fell in love with those wheels the first time I saw them and knew I had to have them on the car. 

This 1950 Merc is another sweet real fire flame project we did last year. We had a blast doing this one. Our customer, Capt Larry is super fun and he had us cracking up laughing most of the time we were there in Florida doing this paint. Yes, we travel to paint flames and graphics, so if you have a paint project and don't live in the Carolina's, we can come to you. If you have your car in the body shop getting painted, we just bring our paint and airbrushes to that shop and work with them to get the job done. 

This is my buddy Bogi. She's awesome! You might know her frm her tv show, All Girl Garage. Bogi is the real deal. She is an ASC certified mechanic and much more. She owns her own shop in Arizona. I don't get to see her as much as I'd like to. We are both so busy. But I did get to work with her on the project in the next photo. 

This is Karen Salvaggio. She's another awesome friend of mine. And that is one wicked cool motor in this picture. Its going into her 1969 AMX. Last year we were working her car, we started the project working on the car in Florida, doing the paint and body. Then it made a stop here at our shop in Waxhaw, where we installed the motor and tranny. That's a Keith Dorton Motor you see hanging off the hoist with a Tremec Transmission hooked to it. The AMX project was very intense and I'll save the details and more pictures for another post. 

Here are my favorite rally stripes I have ever painted and they are on that AMX. Oh the stories I could tell about that project! Man, it was unreal crazy. Well that's all for now. its getting late, and I have to work on some drawings for a real fire flame paint job for a 32 Ford. I have a ton of insane paint project pictures from last year and this year that I will be posting. I also have a Pinterest page now.