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Professional quality paint job for under $100 (Step by step)

Jun 03, 2021
What's up guys, welcome back to Classic Octane? I'm Taylor so today is finally the day that I will be recording an instructional video on how to

paint

a motorcycle so I will be

paint

ing the gas tank also the two side covers and the front fender the process is basically exactly the same for all of the components, so I'll probably just focus on the gas tank since it's the largest. We are going to review all the materials that I am going to use, as well as each of them.

step

and process that I go through to paint these things, so let's dive into it quickly, a little disclaimer before we dive into the tools and materials that I'm going to use.
professional quality paint job for under 100 step by step
This is a process I have developed over the last two years. years, it's still a cheap paint job, it still uses tools that are readily available, it uses materials that aren't very expensive, it's not cheap at all, so I don't want you to think that it's poor

quality

materials, it's just not um. Professional level, I'll say that because it doesn't require you to have a big air compressor with a dryer and a high

quality

paint gun. Those kinds of things like this are a DIY paint job, but Hopefully, you'll see from the results that you're 90 95 of the way to a

professional

paint job for a fraction of the cost.
professional quality paint job for under 100 step by step

More Interesting Facts About,

professional quality paint job for under 100 step by step...

This is an example of how I use the exact technique that I'm about to use to paint this gas tank and You know, I think the average person would have a hard time choosing this over a quote-unquote,

professional

-grade paint job, but I just wanted to make it clear that this is technically a cheap paint job so keep that in mind as we go let's start with the tools and materials that I'm going to use so the first part is the tools the only real tool that I'm going to use to use is a d.a sander, a double action sander, this one happens to be pneumatic, they make them. an electric one too, this is in no way necessary, it will just help you speed up the process and get a little more consistent results.
professional quality paint job for under 100 step by step
I'll throw a link to all of this in the description below so you can do this 100% by hand. I'll use it along with a 220 grit sanding disc. We'll also use a 400 grit sanding sponge and 600 grit sandpaper with one of these little foam sanding pads. That's all when As for the tools, let's move on to the materials. For materials, we'll start with a good quality wax and grease remover. This is very important to be able to remove fine dust, fingerprints, grease or anything like that. The rest we want a nice, clean surface before spraying any type of primer or paint.
professional quality paint job for under 100 step by step
Next up will just be a simple filler automotive primer, this one is dual color and next up will be the actual color. So let me quickly dive into why I choose the colors I do. So what I do is go and find a car or truck that has a very similar or exact color to what I want, for example the silver bike. What I just showed you a second ago is a cement gray Toyota. The customer really liked the color it came in, like Tacoma and Tundra and maybe a couple of other Toyotas that really like that color, so what I was able to do was just find the color code.
For that, search online and find a spray touch up paint that is exactly that color. Dupli-color didn't make that one. I got it from a company called Touch-up Express. I have no affiliation with any of these people. It happens to be the one I used and it turned out to be good quality, so if you find a color you like, look it up online by the color code and get a good quality one. I would get two cans of any coat color. whatever you want and I would also recommend going this route because it makes it a lot easier to touch up the paint in the future so you can get like a little pen the exact same color and you'll know two years from now if you accidentally scratch the gas. tank, you can quickly go in and you know, do a little paint touch up and it won't be perfect, but it will be very close, unlike if you had some kind of custom color, something that would be very difficult to match, so that's why I like to use an automotive grade type of paint and I also use duplicate colors on many projects.
I've had very good luck so far. The last thing that will be very important is our clear coat, so I like to use a 2k automotive grade clear coat. You can see it's 2k right here, which means it's actually two parts that aren't mixed yet, so I'll show you that a little later in the video. I'm going to use that little red button at the top to activate this can. Once activated, you only have about 24 or 48 hours to use it before it hardens in the can and is completely useless, but this type of clear will give you.
You have a much more durable clear coat, you know, that you can wet with sand and wax and you know you treat it like you would a standard clear coat for a car and it also sets up nice and easy, so it's a little bit more expensive than a normal transparent cut. It would be, but I think the results are 100% worth it. Okay, we can start working on this, so mine is already a little simplified. If yours isn't already, you'll want to take off your gas cap. There's a little rivet that goes right through, you can just tap it from the side, exactly the same for the latch, get it out of the way, also go ahead and remove the emblems on the side, they literally pop out, there are two little metal clips that go in. these holes to keep them in place we also remove our petcock just to get it out of the way and you can also mask it, but it's five seconds to remove it so you can do that too.
What we have to do now is kind. To evaluate the general condition of the tank, we are looking for dents, dents or anything like that that we will need to repair. This one is actually in very good condition. Luckily, I'll walk you through it real quick if you have some dings and dents and things you need to repair. You may have to do a little work here. I can see a little bit of rippling and stuff, but we'll see when we take it back a little bit. It looks like there's no major damage or anything, there's no rust, there's no kind of catastrophic problem that we have to deal with, so we're ready to go ahead and grab our dad with that 220 grit sanding disc and I just go to review all this.
We're not looking to get this down to bare metal if you had some rust spots or some bubbles where there might be some rust under the 100 paint get a good quality paint stripper spray it here go down to the bare metal it's not on everything necessary if the paint that's in the tank is already in pretty decent shape it's just the wrong color so I'm going to go ahead and start sanding we'll see how it looks okay another tool I don't think I mentioned before I'm going to wear a dust mask like this, just a standard n95 dust mask for much of the sanding and then I'll wear a full respirator when we're spraying chemicals later.
There is also a lot of dust generated in this process, so be prepared for that. I'm going to go ahead and hit this with some wax and grease remover on a microfiber cloth just to remove a lot of the dust so I can see if we missed it. any spots we're just looking for anywhere that's still shiny, we don't touch that surface, we want to remove any and all shiny spots because shiny means the paint isn't going to adhere very well or the primer isn't going to adhere very well. in this case, clean this up overall, this tank is in very good condition, but I think we're going to do it a little bit.
Yes, there are some little bumps and ridges right here. Actually, I'm not going to worry about that yet. Let's address them in a later

step

right now, yes, there are a couple of little bits and pieces. I don't know if you can see it from that far away, like here where I didn't sand enough along this edge. that we still have some of that previous clear coat shining through, so I'm going to go ahead and hit those spots a second time, and we're going to clean it all up and I'm going to bring them back because it's almost time to start masking.
Now that everything is sanded with the 220 I went ahead and removed the side covers and the front fender as well as the front fender was chrome, you don't want to paint over shiny chrome nothing will stick so you want to make sure you scrape it real good now we just need to mask off the gas cap area because we want to keep the metal bare but we want to paint the latch assembly so make sure not to mask that part off. a small piece of tape over where the petcock goes and everything is masked. I'm going to go ahead and hit it again very thoroughly with the grease remover, wax, wax, you can't really do this step too many times, make sure every square inch is nice and clean and I use microfibers for this, you can use anything you like. you want to make, like a lint-free cloth, you don't want any hairs or anything to get stuck in here because guess what they'll show up on. the final paint job is fine, so now I'm not going to touch any of these important surfaces anymore, the mounting point back here will be fine and anywhere underneath will be fine because they're less crucial, but again, I'm going to install this outside just so we can get a little bit of airflow and we're going to apply it with probably three light to medium coats of this primer, so I'm going to apply a pretty light coat just to give us a base.
We're going to wait 10 minutes between each coat, so relatively, I'll call it a medium to light coat at first, and we'll apply a little bit more intensity on the second and third coat just to make sure it doesn't smudge. I don't want to apply too much in one place, but I also want to get really good coverage and this is also a filler primer so we want it to build up a decent amount so we have something to work with when we start finishing up. sand it and get our surface nice and smooth so I'm going to install this outside and give it a couple coats and we'll see how it looks so I went ahead and let this sit overnight.
You can see I just dusted off a very light coat of actually, there's just a little bit darker primer for our guide coat, now it's time to sand it, so part of the reason I left it on during the night was because I'm right on the kind of threshold as far as temperature goes, you're not really. I'm supposed to paint or prime or whatever when yesterday the temperature is below 60 degrees, today we were in the mid 60s, I don't even know if we're going to get to 60 so I'll have to do the rest of my paint and everything in, so I'm going to set up sort of a temporary paint booth and I turned on my little heater so we can make sure we keep this area above 60 degrees, I'm also going to add a little bit more cooling time. drying between coats to compensate for that too, so I got my 400 grit sanding sponge.
I'm going to start sanding all of this. The purpose of this guide layer is to be able to tell us where we have sanded and you also know that as you sand, if you see a dark spot that remains, you know that it is now a low spot that you need to keep sanding until it goes away or what we might end up having to do is use some glazing putty but I'll cover it when we get there so I'll start sanding it and we'll see what it looks like so I spent I don't know 10 or 15 minutes sanding this this is 100 uh The most important step of all probably You've heard the saying before, but the key to a good paint job is in the prep work, almost nothing is spraying the paint, if you didn't it would all be this step. make a guide layer, I would have a very hard time figuring out where the high and low points were on this gas tank, it looked pretty good, before it was even black and I had to get into the light to be able to see these little marks. but this guide coat makes it very easy where we've sanded down to that original black paint which are our high spots this is a body line so we're hoping to see that these low spots here need to be filled in or They're going to be very obvious and very wavy lines in our paint, especially the darker the color you choose, the more likely it is to show those imperfections, so what I'm going to use is a Bondo product.
It's called icing and stain putty, so the idea of ​​this is to make it super thin, I mean we're not packing on a ton of material here, all we're looking for is like tenths of a millimeter thick just to even this out, like this that if you have a larger problem area that you need to fix you can use a more traditional style bondo and bondo has a very bad reputation because people think that means the repair was done cheaply or poorly uh almost all paint jobs they use bondo, uh the key is you just don't go super thick with the bondo, you don't want to go and have a dent the size of a golf ball and just squish a bunch of bondo in there and sand it down because eventually it willIt will separate, crack and fall off. and that's where Bondo wraps badly if you use it too thin and too light.
Bondo is a great product. There's a reason it's been around for 50 years, so let me get a little applicator spatula of sorts. I don't know what you would call it and I'm going to show you how I'm going to apply this icing putty. I have my little tube here and then I have some plastic. I'll call it a spatula, it's a bit. a little flexible, so the idea here is that I can match that outline and we're going to spread it out as thin as possible, but you also want to make sure you get enough to fix the problem that you're having because what we don't want to have to do is go back and apply more after.
I'm just looking for an application that is as smooth as possible. You can also put it directly on the sheet here and 90 of this will be sanded in the next step so you don't have to worry about it being absolutely perfect, we're just trying to make sure we get everyone right. Those low spots look like a small dent and your hands are actually going to be much more of a tool than your eyes at this point and you will almost never get it perfect on the first go around. One of the most time consuming parts of paint jobs is waiting for the material to dry, sanding to see if you did a good enough job, if not, repeat the application and continue over and over again, so this is a little low spot here that I noticed there's one or two more on this side as well, so we want to make sure we address them at the same time.
I don't think I've noticed any more, it could be a small one, because our temperature is a little low. We'll probably have to let this dry, I'd say 45 minutes to an hour, we don't want to try to sand it before it's done, so I'm going to turn on my little heater and we'll come back. in about an hour, see how we did it, this material has taken forever to dry at this temperature, but this side is working fine. I started with this piece to be 100% sure, but all I'm doing is continuing with our 400 grit sanding sponge.
I don't know if I understood why you use a sponge instead of just a sheet of sandpaper. The idea is that the sponge serves as a cushion where your fingers are so you don't sand. You know, with three points of pressure it evens out. the pressure of your hand and it makes it easier to get a smooth surface, so for this one here I'm just going to sand right on top of it, the idea is to just blend that spot with the surrounding area so that you have sort of a perfectly smooth transition. , so just change a couple different angles and you can start to check it out by feeling with my hand my instinct is telling me that it's actually still a little bit low, I can feel just a small amount, so we're probably going to play that one again, so I'll stop at that one for now, move over here and I've got my little air gun here too, but since this sponge gets a little bit clogged, you can blow it out.
I have sanded all the spots. to which I think is pretty decent, honestly, I think this side is going to be okay. I think I'm going to have to do a little more work here to figure it out, but at this point I just wiped it all off with wax. and grease remover, now I'm going to apply another coat of primer, the exact same primer we've been using, which will help fill in the fine sanding scratches and give me a nice clean starting point to start this process again. until this thing is perfect, the primer is completely dry, it looks pretty good, I think there's a very small little dent here that I missed, so I want to point out to give it a little more skim coat now, the idea here is I.
I'm just going over the entire surface, really trying to make it nice and even. It feels pretty good if you're just looking for a spot with a little more primer buildup or something, it's okay if we keep going. Because I'm going to dust this with a lighter coat of primer before I put any kind of color on it, it looks pretty good, so I'm going to keep doing that and keep using my 400. Once I get it all right. and I'll even apply it with a final coat of primer like I just mentioned, once it's dry I'll switch to 600 grit before applying our first coat of color, ready to move on to the last step before what color it will be. 600 grit on our little sanding sponge, I'm just going to wrap it around it and I'm just going to run around this thing and lightly tap the entire surface, this is just to get rid of any imperfections in the primer coat, anything that may have fallen off. or you know, small contaminations, something like that, you know, the heavy lifting is already done.
You know, I'll be really smoothing everything out, so we're not trying to remove a ton of material. Here we are finally ready for some color. I set up my paint booth, which is definitely not just my workbench with a curtain, that's for sure. I put the tank on a swivel stool with some paper so I could turn it and paint both sides nice and even. Without having to touch the tank, I've got my front fender in kind of a little box here with the sides taped down that we don't want to be green, which is ready to go and I actually have both side covers, uh, just placed.
Off camera because I'm going to paint them too, so the first thing we're going to do is paint the bottom of the gas tank, so the bottom is not very important for obvious reasons, but we don't want to leave it alone with the color of primer. I'd like it to at least be green, so I'm just going to dust it off with a light to medium coat. We'll probably just apply one coat underneath so we don't use a ton of paint. I just want it to be green to match the rest so I'm going to go ahead and remove it and I'll probably have to give it 10 to 15 minutes since it's going to be on top of that fresh paint when I'm going to do that so I'm going to remove the bottom from this.
I'm also going to do the back of both side covers with just a light coat and then we'll move on to the important thing about painting the rest we're ready to start painting the top so I'm going to do it nice and clear the color will be It will look weird, it will look like neon green for the first few coats, but don't worry. It's going to get a lot darker as we keep adding layers, so let's go ahead and do it, definitely wear a respirator, especially if you're like me and it's cold outside so you have to paint inside, ready for layer number two.
One important thing to keep in mind is to don't start spraying while you're facing the tank, you know you want to start over to the side and then come over because you're going to get a super strong spray in that first half second and you can put on too much paint. and cause a run or cause kind of a weird looking spot so just start with the tank and do a sweep trying to keep a constant distance the whole time another quick note is uh when you feel the cans start to run out , which These cans don't last long, which is why I recommend at least buying two.
Don't keep spraying with them because if you're spraying and you go at some angle when it starts to empty, you'll start to like it. uh it spits and it stutters or sputters a little bit and that can cause some kind of weird extra droplets to hit it and give it an uneven finish so when you feel like it's running low if you're going to tilt the can. Not at all, it's better to just move on to the next game, so here's a little glimpse of how it goes. This should be all the color we need. You can see it has a decent reflection there.
We haven't applied a clear coat to this yet. So we have good reflection, good solid coverage. What you're looking for here is any kind of um, I guess, dry spots or any spots that are a little bit lighter. You want to make sure the color is distributed very evenly throughout. Mine looks pretty good, it looks like two cans were enough to make a tank, a front fender and both side covers. We were a little worried that we would run out, but so far so good, so I'm going to leave it. This is left to sit overnight, I'll bring you back in the morning and we'll apply it a little light, so I went ahead and let it sit over the weekend.
I just can't cure it completely, there's really no reason to wait that long, it just happened. to make it work that way for me, so now I'm ready to go over everything good and close what I'm looking for is any drips anywhere where we like to splatter and have like a big blob of paint, something like that, luckily, No. I see no problem that we need to solve. Everything looks very good. The paint turned out well and even I don't have any complaints about this, so if we had a problem, this is where I would take, I would say 2000 grit.
I might be able to do like sixteen hundred I'd probably start with two thousand uh, you can do it wet or dry, I probably recommend doing it wet, wet the sandpaper, you know, dip it in a little bit of water, get a little bottle with atomizer and the water simply acts. like a little bit of lubrication and with 2000 grit sandpaper you just go over it until you get that nice smooth finish to get that little drip or drip off and everything will be nice and smooth again and you're good to go, luckily we take our time and I don't have to worry about any of that, so we're ready to move on to the clear coat, so the first thing I'm going to do is hit everything with a new rag and our wax and grease remover. for any little dust or something like that that may have fallen on it and of course we touch it with our hand which can leave little fingerprints and those will show up on our clear coat, we want all of this to be perfectly clean, fresh and I'll continue and I'll clean up my fender and side covers as well, so to activate our clear coat we just need to remove this little red button from the cover like this, we'll place it at the bottom, there's like a little post. sticking out and we're going to press down like this until it goes all the way in, I like to hold it down now we're going to shake it up, I would say at least a minute, maybe two minutes, make sure all that activator and everything is mixed well and then we're ready to go. spray so this clear coat make sure you have a good quality respirator don't just wear a dust mask this is very very toxic so there is literally extreme danger.
On the front you don't want to breathe this stuff in, so I'm going to do basically the same technique that we did with the color. You know, don't go too crazy with the coats we'll start with. It's good, you know, I would say light to medium and we're going to apply a full coat, wait 10 to 12 minutes in between and continue and I'll keep applying coats until I run out of varnish, so probably I guess three, maybe four, probably four coats total, so here she is after I'm going to call this three and a half coats, uh, and the reason I call it a half coat is once the can gets really low. , just as I mentioned? the color you don't want to have can also be horizontal otherwise it may start to splatter so for the fourth layer I really kept the can vertical and sprinkled the sides and a little bit on top and the same goes for the fender too but you can see the finish we were able to get you, because in the garage there is no noise in the paint booth, I can paint the work, I think it looks pretty good and it will only get better as it dries so you can write.
Look, there's a little bit of what I guess you'd call orange peel or something right now. This clear is actually self leveling so as this clear dries it will smooth out a little bit as you can probably see in This tank I painted it with the exact same clear coat and it has a lot less ripples there so a lot of that takes care of itself as it dries, but I'm very happy with the result. I think this looks really, really good. I don't have any complaints, so I'm going to go ahead and let this sit honestly for probably two days just because I don't have a reason to touch it or move it or anything before you want to give it to you. let's say at least 24 hours before you actually start handling it just to make sure everything has enough time to heal, everything is fine, the worst possible thing would be to have this thing you know with a big fingerprint or something because you got impatient and you picked it up or moved it or something, so I'm just going to leave it all here drying for the next few days and call this good, so one thing you can do is As I mentioned with the color coding, if you have a run like a little sunken, something like that, you can wet sand this to clean it up, so once it's fully cured, you can come back with a little bit of 2000 grit, maybe even a little bit higher and just wet sand very carefully and you'll be able to work out a lot of the imperfections. of improvisation.
You'd be a little surprised how many mistakes you can fix after the fact, you just don't want to be too aggressive. I don't want to sand this clear coat to get the color back and then you'll have a dull stain, so you have to be careful. Honestly, I would probably wait a couple of weeks before applyingany type of compound or polish. or anything because you want the clear coat to be 100 cured. I know that some car clear coats, you know, can take up to a month or two to be officially fully cured, so you don't want to get in there before that. everything is fully hardened you want to give it a little bit of time to set it up but I'm really excited so that's what I'm going to call it in this video because all the hard work is done so now we're just waiting.
For this to dry, I'm also going to wait a day or two before removing the tape and reinstalling the gas cap and such, so as not to cause any blemishes or anything on the clear coat while it cures. I think that's the way it will be, so I hope this video shows you my technique, maybe given you a little more confidence in getting what I think is a really decent quality paint job at home with easy to find materials. which I will link. all in the description below if you have any questions or anything please let me know in the comments.
I appreciate you watching and I'll see you next time.

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