Thinking about taking the tank off the bike and re-painting it. Love the vivid black, but not a fan of the horrible logo on the 2011 Forty-Eight. The whole bike looks great, then they just seemed to stick the most horrible generic logo on the tank.

Any tips/hints?

I have done a lot of spray can work on cars in the past. Plan is to sand, prime, several coats of gloss black, decal, clear, cut and polish.

I have tried to get bids out of several shops around here (considering the ease of the scheme I want) and have gotten no answers.

 

Good luck, I had offers from 2K to $800 for a basic blue paint job. Go to the dealership and ask the parts guys or the mechanics, they refered me to a local shop that did really great work, cheap.

 

See thats what I dont get. What about a 2.1 gallon "peanut" tank is so expensive to paint? All I want is black with a white design thats already layed out and I already have the decals for.

 

You may have to sandblast or paint strip, that paint is strong. Go to your auto body repair guys, they're cheap as dirt and they got all the good colors.

 

What you dont understand is its probably not worth it for a body shop to mess with your tins. Not enough profit. They want insurance work, not bike tins.

 

I had my last set of "tins" (what a quaint little phrase) painted by a local bicycle shop, the owner custom painted bikes for certain customers.

Call a few custom body shops and use your innate "charm and poise." In other words, buy the paint, buy the lunch, buy the beer. Nothing beats a "puppy dog face" and your **** together.

You can do it.

John

 

Amen! Why would a big name shop bother with a few petty dollars if they can do a few thousand dollar car repair... It's just not worth their time.

When I was looking to get my fender repainted gloss black, I called around... The big shops were quoting me $3-500 to do it, I eventually came across a small privately owned shop that was willing to do it for $100. Done deal, great guy and it turned out perfect.

I asked him out about doing my tank as I also hate the 48 decals, due to the decals being cleared it's a little more labor intensive and would be around $250-300 to have it done.

I'm no expert in the field, but I've been told not to sandblast a tank.. you can easily warp it. Also the trick is only taking off enough material to get the decal off, you dont wanna go to bare metal then you got to start all over.

Apparently all auto paint is water based too or something, enviro friendly, but expensive.

No idea if this would work or not, but maybe if you could remove the decal and prep the tank shops wouldn't gouge you so bad...


Here's what I did for the time being,


I just cut out a template for each side of the tank, then cut out some gloss black vinyl, you can hardly see the difference from 10' away.. haha it works for now until I can afford the downtime to get it painted.

 

If you did all the prep work and all i had to do is spray one color i wouldnt charge less than $600.

 

Agree with everything so far. The day I got the bike I sanded the logo off.

But it's just paint and steel. Sand it now to lose the logo, but come up with ideas over the winter to paint it:

 

Seeing that your from Texas... Check out Chemical Candy Customs in Dallas, one of the top painters around!

http://thebackstreetbucket.blogspot.ca/

Probably not cheap, but you'll have the slickest 48 in town!


(Yes thats a beer holder!)