Painting a Bike

My son has had a Boardman Road Race and has beat the living daylights out of it over 6-7 years. It has been used and abused and was looking very sorry for itself. By the summer of 2019 a lot of paint was coming off the top tube due to corrosion and there were many scratches and marks all over the rest of the frame. As well as the cosmetic damage the bike needed a very thorough service - for example it had a seized front derailleur, and a rounded rear brake bolt meant we could not remove the rear calliper were some of the issues

I wanted a bit of as project so offered to completely strip the bike, strip the paint from the frame, repaint and rebuild, which is what I did.

Here's some pictures of the state of the frame at the start (these were taken to record the location of the Boardman transfers):

You can see here the state of the top tube

These pictures were taken after I had stripped pretty well everything off the frame. It was in a very bad way. I could only get one of the Bottom Bracket bearings out myself  - the other I gave up on and took it to a bike shop. There was a lot of banging for 5-10 minutes to remove it. I only had the plastic tool and a "half" round spanner for it for these smaller Shimano Bottom brackets as follows:

I just could not get the cup to move.I have since bought some more and hopefully better tools as the visit to the LBS cost £10:

This is a Park Tools  BBT-69.2 Tool 3/8" drive

This is the Park Tools BBT-9 tool - identical size to the BB62 but also fits centre lock disk lock rings

Link for the Park Tools:
BBT-69.2 - Link
BBT-9 - Link

I could not remove the bottle cage bolts with the cage in place so I cut the cages off (they were nylon) and ended up having to drill the bolts out (carefully). I needed to re-tap the threads after this. The screw that held the bottom bracket cable guide did come out with an impact driver after a soak with penetrating oil.

The rear brake retention nut had rounded off the internal hex.

Once the brake cable was removed I could remove the brake calliper itself. I then screwed in a standard bolt into the nut. Plan A was to hammer the nut out using the bolt but this was not shifting it. Plan B was to place a thick metal plate on the rear of the seat stays behind the nut and then apply a G Clamp to the head of the bolt and the metal plate. In this way I could get a lot of static pressure onto the bolt. Once this was as tight as I could get it I then tapped the clamp to shock the nut through the bolt. This broke the corrosion holding it in place and I could then tighten the clamp a little more and push the nut out pretty easily. I needed to use an 8mm drill (carefully) from the rear to clean the corrosion out from the frame locating hole and I greased it thoroughly before reassembly. This close up (after priming) shows that there is a sufficient gap between where the nut sits flush and the seat stays

The BB, bottle cage and cable guide bolts were really hard to remove and took most of a morning, a lot of swearing and sweat. Although the rear brake nut was also tight it did come out relatively easily using the Plan B approach

Having got all the fittings removed from the frame I spent a long tine stripping the paint off back to the bare metal. I used a combination of a delta sander, standard paint stripper, a fine grit emery sponge pad (by hand) and a Dremel with a small wire brush attachment and sanding band:

The use of the Dremel and the attachments was surprisingly effective and durable. The sanding band was quite course but scored the paint well so that the paint stripper could get right into it and remove it with only a couple of applications. The wire brush lasted for the whole frame and whilst looked tired by the end was still effective. It was really useful to get into all the frame joints and remove paint where emery paper just could not get to. Whilst it removed the paint it did not scratch the frame itself.

It took a few hours over a couple of weekends but I was able to get the frame right back to shiny bare metal. I finished the job with a fine grit sanding pad.The following pictures show it hanging in the garage ready for painting. I hung it from the head tube via some studding and string and put some more studding through the rear axle so I could guide and control the frame. The light and my phone's camera is not that great but the frame is fully prepared and stripped and has been cleaned with methylated spirits. I was surprised how good the frame was under the paint - I had assumed that the worst of the visible corrosion was more than surface deep but actually it needed no more than a rub down with the emery pad to bring back to smooth metal. I did the stripping on the pation in front of the garage to avoided splashing paint stripper and dust over the inside of the garage. Here's the result:
 

The whole frame ready for painting

Detail of the head tube and bottom bracket

Detail of the rear dropout and studding

Detail of the head tube

I used Spray.Bike paint for the job. I'd seen some recommendations on line and read the website (Website is Here) very carefully. Back in my youth I'd repainted a bike using standard rattle can car paints and the job was not that great. However I felt pretty positive about this and other people had also reported good results. 

I decided that despite the comment that "Spray.Bike paint will adhere to most raw metal and painted surfaces without any major pre-prep." I decided that I would use the Primer and using primer would also give me a bit of spraying practice prior to applying the more critical top coat. My son had chosen the matte black as the colour to use:

I bought 1 can of primer, 2 of of the black topcoat and 1 of the transparent Matte Finish. The instructions said that 1 400ml can would suffice for a frame, but I wanted to be sure that I had plenty of the top coat. This came to about £40 all in sop not exactly cheap. I also bought a couple of cheap face masks and used my older glasses just in case

The key message about use and application was the distance of the nozzle from the frame - and it was different for the primer and top coats.

I initially sprayed the frame with the primer. To be honest when I was in the correct spray range it covered well and evenly - I had one small run in an awkward place that I addressed following the instructions. The paint really is touch dry after a few minutes but I waited 3-4 hours before applying the top coat.

I got a similarly good result although there were a few areas where the surface was visibly "powdery" as I had not applied enough paint. It is a lot easy to spray the main tubes (top, down and seat) as these are a bigger target to aim for. The narrow seat and chain stays are where I needed a second go and this is where I needed to respray over these to improve the outcome. Here's the results after the first and second sprays:

Bottom bracket detail

Head tube, top and down tube detail

Seat post detail

Head Tube detail (the white mark is a loose thread from a sheet, not a scratch)

This is the top of fork

The next day I applied the transparent finish and a few hours later was ready to rebuild the bike.

The very nature of an aerosol spray on quite a narrow target ,means that there is quite a lot of missed spray that was on the garage floor. I had hung the frame from the garage roof and surrounded it on 3 sides with old bedsheets. This was just about OK. By the time the overspray that missed the frame had landed on the floor it was basically dry dust and could be swept up easily. However - do not try and spray without protecting everything around the area

This is the easy part - I have built a few bikes in the past years (see here) and in this case it was just a case of refitting the original (or replacement) parts. I used a lot of grease on all the threaded joints and threaded the new bottom bracket in and out a few times to ensure that both the male and female threads were well greased to make it easier to remove the next time

I was geared up to get some Boardman Transfers for the frame (loads on EBay) but my son decided he wanted it to be unmarked so its currently fully "stealth". However I don't currently have any photos of the completed bike after all this work

In overall time this was a 3-4 month project. In actual work time it was probably
2-3 weekend mornings stripping the bike and preparing the frame
2 weekend mornings painting
1 weekend morning rebuilding the bike

I'd really recommend the Spray.Bike paint - easy to use and gave a good result. The project was for me very therapeutic - I enjoy this sort of job - and my son was very pleased with the outcome