Went to the local stealer today for a quart (smallest you can buy) of vivid black to paint my cafe racer fender. Price $62.50. i only paid 45 for the brand new fender. Anybody got any leftovers???? :frownone

I would go to a good auto body shop and order up an exact match. All they need is the code.

isnt the paint Polyurethane like Dupont imron -- Imron is 100.00+ per gallon for automotive use -- same stuff is 50.00 per gallon for boats and planes and grain silos.

Went to the local stealer today for a quart (smallest you can buy) of vivid black to paint my cafe racer fender. Price $62.50. i only paid 45 for the brand new fender. Anybody got any leftovers???? :frownone


Geeze, I thought the $9.00 oil was high.

You can go to a good paint shop and have them mix up cans of paint. Some large Napa stores mix paint in cans as well. What they do is feed in your paint code and it mixes it and prepares the paint to be sprayed. Mixing paint right is sometimes harder than painting. So get it premixed in cans and spray away. That is how I did my tank the first two times and it came out great without all the hassles of cleaning, mixing, spraying, and working with regular poly paint.

There is a local paint supplier around here that has a special camera that takes an up close picture of your paint, blends it up & will put into spray cans for you :clap . Pretty cool idea I thought, 'specially for smaller projects like fenders :D

Dave

Thanks for the info, i am gonna give it a shot with Genuine HD spray paint in a can as soon as it warms up, It was ONLY 14.50!!!!!!!

Black is black, just need to find the product that best suits
your needs wether it be Dupont, PPG, or House of Kolor
which is my favorite paint.

Find a good local painter who will do a nice job, and ask him
for his past references were he has done jobs in the past.

FYI: Dont ever put laquer paint over any kind of enamel paint
or base coat clear coat products. The laquer paints will peel
off right in front of your eyes. :yikes

There is a local paint supplier around here that has a special camera that takes an up close picture of your paint, blends it up & will put into spray cans for you . Pretty cool idea I thought, 'specially for smaller projects like fenders

I've seen this before, but I was very unimpressed with the results. My has a 1966 GTO that needed a new front fender because of an accident, and he decided to have it "photo-matched". The color was so far off it wasn't even funny, and the painter told him that it couldn't get any better. His car is a nice, rich-looking burgendy metallic. The new fender was much lighter in color and almost pale-looking. Needless to say, he had te whole car repainted to avoid the issue...

I don't know if this was just a crappy shop or what, but I would be weary of this method. If you decide to do this, I would suggest having them spray a scrap piece of metal so you can see the results before you commit it to your bike.

I sort have to go with what was said before...black is black. Just see what paint best suits your needs.

PPG makes the paint for Harley - Harley Sierra Red Base coat - PPG 902850 (you may want to copy that number if you have a Sierra Red Bike, took me a while to find it.)
The Sierra Red was $180.00 QT to get it mixed at a paint store, just for the base coat!!!! :yikes

They are Base coat / Clear Coat Urethane.

At the dealer a QT of the Sierra Red is $130. but they tell me it is a direct gloss. (Does not require a clear coat) I may use it anyway and clear again after the flames are on.

Paint sticker shock!!!!

Black is black, just need to find the product that best suits
your needs wether it be Dupont, PPG, or House of Kolor
which is my favorite paint.

I used to mix paint at NAPA and you would be surprised at the different shades and mixtures for basic black.

A 2 oz bottle of sierra red touch up is 16.50 from HD. :yikes

I used to mix paint at NAPA and you would be surprised at the different shades and mixtures for basic black.
Actually you wouldn't believe how hard black can be to match. I have tried it on a couple of projects and the basic problem is the amount of reflectivity. That is to say to exactly match the level of gloss or flatness. Not to mention exactly matching the shade.

I'll top the $60 plus HD price...a friend has a 2003 Yamaha R6 in Liquid Silver and Yamaha wants $100 a pint for their paint. No one else makes their special color, so my friend is taking a piece off his bike into a paint store to see if they can color match it, but no guarantees. In all honesty, the color is cool, but I'm pretty sure you could paint the whole damn bike over again with another generic silver color and not miss it too much:) I'll let you know how the color matching goes and who did the matching as soon as he gets it back and painted.

I used to have a custom motorcycle paint shop and I would mix my own colors or go to the local Body/Paint Supply House and get my colors mixed by them. I mainly shot Lacquers because my paint jobs consisted of anywhere from 5-10 coats of base color paint and and a good 5 coats of clear. Then I would wet sand and hand rub the final top coat to a mirror finish.

Anyway, the saying "black is black" is NOT true. You can definitely end up with a shadow effect if you use the wrong black mix or number.

Not so sure that the HD Dealers Sierra Red is a simple one coat enamel. Could be the same PPG # but mixed special for HD. Check the cans label. Usually they'll state you can top coat with clear if desired...which probably means you should in the first place.

You can actually get a very good result with a spray can if you know what your doing. Some of the newer cans have the wider fan spray tips that mimic the fan spray pattern of the larger spray guns. If you can control spitting at the tip, the finish should lay down pretty evenly on a small piece like a motorcycle fender.

Hey, what do you have to lose..$14.00 and some time? You can always sand it down again and start over. Its just paint.

While the paint spectrum detectors can scan a sample of your original paint shade, it can only come close to it because it uses its own codes/color sample/memory in its system to come up with a close match.

You would need the codes of the original paint color to get it virtually dead on.

Even with a dead on color mix you can still screw up the color match once you apply it. This is especially true with metallics. Depending on how you 'lay' the final color coat down and the amount of air pressure you use, the metallic flakes can end up laying in a different direction from the original.

Ever look at a car that had its fender or door painted and noticed that while the color is the same, it looks as though the door or fender came off another vehicle of the same color. What your seeing is the flakes reflecting light at a different angle. That's why you should either paint the whole side of the car with the new or repaired door or fender or minimally feather the paint past the repair section and well into the next panel, which helps to trick the eye into seeing one continous coat of paint

This would not be a problem for your Fender because its far away from the other similiarly colored painted parts on the bike.

The Enamels that require a Clear coat are simply a two-part system paint. You must use the Clear to seal the Base Coat to obtain the gloss and protect the base coat.

Here's a pic of a HD Tank I did back in 1978. the Ridgid frame that the tank bolted to also had the colors coming off the back of the tank down onto the frame and down the sides ending in a feather type design with some matching feathering and colors around and under the neck area.

Did a lot of paint jobs but lost almost all my photos and negatives when I moved years ago. Most of them are just pictures in my head now.