My father used to do that stuff too......
Hi John,
Thanks for your kind words. One of my great regrets is that my Dad is not able to help me, he's in his late 70's now and not in great health. As an engineering apprentice on the LNER railway and a life-long motorcyclist there is not much Dad hasn't done, and at least I can have him on the end of the telephone when I'm doing something. I'd love to have had his lathe and milling machine but I can just about reduce a bit of bar in diameter and part it - end of story.
He re-painted and lined the tank on Ian Hamilton's racing egli - to put it back to black. I've got some superb 9by5 black and white pictures of it. He taught me that preparation was one of the big keys to good paintwork, careful rubbing down and then using a "disclosing" primer coat which showed up the small imperfections in the underlying metal. He would spend several days rubbing, filling, rubbing, filling, priming and so on until he got it where he wanted to and moved onto the final colour.
He also used to warm the object and spray onto gently warmed metal - the paint flowed better and resulted in a superb shiny finish.
He actually handpainted several of the smaller parts on our Rapide back in the 70's and when I bought the bike back from Australia last year those very same parts are still on, and still in that handpainted condition looking great (you can tell from the small chips and showing red oxide primer underneath).
I cheated, my headlamp shell had a poor finish on it and as it was one of the big expanses of black you looked down onto when riding along I stripped everything out and had Templeton's in Coventry do it for me - wow what a great job, I'm really pleased with it.
Thanks again for the encouragement, great fun isn't it.
Regards
Stuart