Paint Stripping

This weekend was all about stripping the old paint from the bike and preparing the surface for the new auto paint I have coming. It's an extremely tedious and messy process, but necessary to achieve a high-quality finish.

Here you can see the tank with some high-strength epoxy/paint remover on it. Crazy stuff. Whoever painted the bike before I got it used pretty low quality paint to so that layer was eaten off pretty easily.

A few coats of stripper, a razor, and some sandpaper made short work of the decals and the surface turned out to be pretty smooth. It's really handy that Snark's have detachable tanks.

Next I started with the frame. Layer after layer was slowly removed and scraped away, the crevasses and welds in the frame being the biggest pain in the ass. Luckily, the most difficult spots are located up underneath the frame so the blemishes will be minor.

It turned out kind of odd how the original color, the darker red under the old paint in this photo, is very similar to the new paint color I'm going with. It was obviously higher quality and took 6-8 coats of stripper to finally remove off the frame and fenders.

Here's the nearly finished pieces. There's still some gunk in the seams which I may pressure-wash to ensure they are as clean as possible, but other than that just some light sanding and I'm ready for primer!

Breakdown

With my paint on the way I've started to breakdown all the parts I added to the bike over the last three months. I've spent about 3 hours so far, and I'm a bit farther than these pictures show (down to the frame and wiring) so I should finish up the teardown tomorrow.

I've been putting all the parts, screws and custom parts in ziplock bags to try and keep everything as organized as possible. I just hope I can put it all back together again!

Construction...Finished!

I'm done! After 3 months and 300 hours of searching for parts, cutting, fitting, sketching, thinking, failing, and more money spent at Home Depot that I'm willing to admit, I'm finally done with phase 1. The last two phases are paint and finally performance upgrades, but they're relatively short phases in comparison. I've already begun gathering supplies for painting and planning how to tear down and organize all my parts. But for now, I'm basking in glow of...completion. It's not quite a success yet, but I'll settle for "done" at this point.

Paint Supplies

I've spend a good deal of time researching painting techniques as I've never done any work with an HVLP spray gun before. I thinking I have the processes, tools and materials decided on so I'll probably be ordering them sometime this week. I decided on a wine-burgundy color (with a slightly glittery tint) for the base color of the bike. I think it will be a good fit. I'll take some final pictures of the completed construction once it's complete.

Gauge Sleeves

One more small addition I made to the front end is a set of sleeves for the gauges. These will help protect the wiring connections on the back of the gauges and give them a more finished look. I have only one more small piece to install, a tube that will hold some spare 2-stroke oil and then construction will be complete!

Whistle Install

The solution I finally decided on is fairly low-tech, but proved to be the most effective in producing the loudest sound. I simply attached some rubber tubing to a valve I installed in the whistle and made a simple holster allowing me to pull the tube out and blow in to it to make the whistle sound.

The whistle itself is mounted behind the seat which actually ties the whole rear end together quite nicely. It's not advanced as I originally wanted, but I think it's a good idea. I have a trumpet mouthpiece coming from ebay to finish this section off.

Whistle Test

I tried using steam from the stove to see if my boiler idea was going to work. Unfortunately, it seems that the power of just the rising air was not enough to make the steam whistle. I used the weights to make a seal between the pot and the wood and attached the tube over a small hole to funnel the steam. No joy. I also tried using the air compressor with various nozzles with a variety of success, but I think I'm going to need a simpler solution.

Gauge Lens

The last finishing touch to the dash section was the articulating arm that held a lens for a true steampunk touch. I used desk lamp arm that I picked up at the thrift store provided the part I needed, and it fit perfectly on to the lamp assembly.



As you can see, by aligning the lens in front of a gauge the needle and numbers appear larger, so the piece is pretty functional.