Some lessons learned on painting Big Blue Pearl

I had a lot of pieces I wanted painted, so instead of ordering color matched parts ($$$) straight from MoCo, I bought a factory pack of Vivid Black base and Big Blue Pearl. This is the hardest paint job I've ever done. I'm a hobbyist, I shoot paint maybe 3 or 4 times a year on various projects. I've done some metallics and candy, this is the first time shooting pearl.

The black base is very easy. It's just black paint. You don't even need to buy MoCo Vivid Black. Any inexpensive Urethane such as Starlight Black (Dupont 99A) would work for about half the cost of HD PPG paint. Some parts come primed, but things like the mid frame deflectors are just bare plastic. For that, you must prime before painting. I used some urethane 2k with adhesion promoter for plastic.

The Pearl top coat is the hard part. I've redone my parts twice now. It is very difficult to get it even, had tiger stripes my first try. Color is also tricky. You look at your work and you think it's too dark, so you shoot another coat and all of a sudden it looks purple. If you accidentally haze over a piece it turns frosty white.

I think I finally got the gun down. I normally set my spray pattern for 6" from the surface. You can't do that with this pearl. I've found 12" minimum to get the overlap right or else you'll end up with tiger stripes. Another difference is in the coat. Every other paint I've ever shot was a 25%-50% overlap wet coat, then wait 15 min to flash before a 2nd wet coat. For this pearl, the first coat is a 75% overlap wet coat, wait only a minute or two, then very light 2nd and possibly 3rd coat to get the color right. It's very easy to spray a 2nd wet coat and immediately have too much color.

Finally, with Big Blue Pearl you are going to have to learn to live with "Good Enough." At first I was a little disappointed with the way my color turned out, so I sanded down and started over. One the 2nd try, some of the parts were still not matching. I thought maybe I had messed up again, until I really started looking at the bike closely. That is when I realized the factory paint doesn't even match. On my bike, the factory saddle bag bottoms and side covers are darker than the lids with larger "chunks" of pearl, the tank is kind of in between also with large chunks of pearl, and the fairing and front fender are very blue (brighter, less Vivid Black showing through) with a very fine pearl by comparison. Now that I'm paying attention, the tank and front fender in particular are not a close match from the factory.

Hope this helps someone on their project. There are some pieces that just can't be purchased color matched, so for that I really didn't have an option anyway. If I was just looking to get my speaker lids painted, I would definitely buy color matched from MoCo so that if they didn't look right you could just send them back; if my time were worth anything, I'd be upside down on this project. If you're going to attempt this on your own and haven't shot pearl before, I highly recommend getting some pieces of scrap metal to practice on first. I wish I had done that myself.

 

You should try spraying four stage candy colors, very hard to match. The same painter will have trouble matching parts painted on different days. When spraying metallics and pearls its usually best to spray the entire bike / auto. Even then its not going to be perfect unless you maintain perfect distance and speed with the gun.

 

That's why I would send it back to the MOCO.

 

I am not a painter by any means and your description of the process does make it seem as if painting BBP would be a pain in the ***. I had some parts from my 07 Deep Cobalt Blue RG painted to match my 12 BBP RG. When I was asking around for a reputable guy to do the job, I was told that the amount of time the paint had been mixed would cause color differences. That even the factory paint would not match exactly if it was applied at different times during the day, like it would get darker as the day went on. This might be an issue for all paint as far as I know, but thought that was an interesting piece of information concerning Big Blue Pearl...

 

I too have bbp and I have had some parts painted I've found tht plastic parts like the mid frame covers just wouldn't lighten up always darker, but for metal pieces like the fork cans and fender skirt ****!! So I think materials have a lot to do with it!! I will be painting more parts this winter and will see how it goes!!! I only used moco bbp pearl coat and house mix vivid black!!! Got some Hogtunes speaker lids at he painters now..I know their gonna be ****!!!

 

I had my inner fairing on my BBP road glide and my wife's tank on her sportster redone from a guy in Jacksonville and they where a great match.
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