I received a BOMA サイII (Saiyuu II) frame from a customer (technically speaking).
They'd collided with an acquaintance and damaged the frame.
Besides that, one of the rear wheel spokes I'd built was bent,
but that got fixed right away.
The customer (technically speaking) was talking about
doing a rough touch-up with nail polish,
so I told them I'd do a cleaner job instead
and asked them to leave it as-is without doing anything.
I took the whole bike.
I removed the rear brake.
I cleaned the left rear triangle.
You can see that the areas of this frame that don't get much sunlight have a darker color,
while other parts are slightly faded.
So I decided to color-match it to the
pink tone of the surrounding paint.
The repaired spot might fade differently
than the rest of the frame's paint
as time goes on, but
compared to carelessly slapping on nail polish,
if the paint film is smooth and durable, that's fine by me.
The goal is something like
"someone who doesn't know about the damage won't even notice the repair spot."
I sanded down the paint irregularities and leveled the surface.
Between the white primer and the current outer pink layer,
you can see the original pink layer showing through.
It's like tsuishu (a carved red lacquerware technique), or Fordite.
Fordite comes from the days when the automotive industry was booming—
it's made from paint that accumulated on the walls of Detroit auto factories,
carved out like tsuishu into a (probably not great for your health) gemstone-like object.
The name comes from Ford (the auto manufacturer) + "ite" (the suffix for stones),
and it's also called Detroit agate.
The color doesn't match!
My hand-held model paint pink
(normally used for Zeon Mobile Suit monocle eyes)
is darker than the frame's pink, so I tried diluting it with white,
but no matter how much I mix, it won't match at all.
The color's not right, but I laid down enough paint film
to fill in the thickness gap with the surroundings and let it dry.
Oh! This is pretty close!
I repeated applying the color sample with a mixing stick
directly to the frame and wiping it off
Well, for a touch-up job,
I got a color that's good enough.
What I learned from doing this was that yellow is critical—
just about three earwax-scraper-fulls of yellow made
the color match jump forward dramatically.
Since I didn't write down the total amount,
I can't really say what proportion three earwax-scraper-fulls represents,
so it's not particularly useful information.
The pink color isn't made from pink + white,
but rather from clear red + white as the base.
↑After painting, I wet-sanded with 2000-grit paper and painted again,
then finished with a clear coat,
so the paint film won't peel even if you spray it with parts cleaner.
They'd collided with an acquaintance and damaged the frame.
Besides that, one of the rear wheel spokes I'd built was bent,
but that got fixed right away.
The customer (technically speaking) was talking about
doing a rough touch-up with nail polish,
so I told them I'd do a cleaner job instead
and asked them to leave it as-is without doing anything.
I took the whole bike.
I removed the rear brake.
I cleaned the left rear triangle.
You can see that the areas of this frame that don't get much sunlight have a darker color,
while other parts are slightly faded.
So I decided to color-match it to the
pink tone of the surrounding paint.
The repaired spot might fade differently
than the rest of the frame's paint
as time goes on, but
compared to carelessly slapping on nail polish,
if the paint film is smooth and durable, that's fine by me.
The goal is something like
"someone who doesn't know about the damage won't even notice the repair spot."
I sanded down the paint irregularities and leveled the surface.
Between the white primer and the current outer pink layer,
you can see the original pink layer showing through.
It's like tsuishu (a carved red lacquerware technique), or Fordite.
Fordite comes from the days when the automotive industry was booming—
it's made from paint that accumulated on the walls of Detroit auto factories,
carved out like tsuishu into a (probably not great for your health) gemstone-like object.
The name comes from Ford (the auto manufacturer) + "ite" (the suffix for stones),
and it's also called Detroit agate.
The color doesn't match!
My hand-held model paint pink
(normally used for Zeon Mobile Suit monocle eyes)
is darker than the frame's pink, so I tried diluting it with white,
but no matter how much I mix, it won't match at all.
The color's not right, but I laid down enough paint film
to fill in the thickness gap with the surroundings and let it dry.
Oh! This is pretty close!
I repeated applying the color sample with a mixing stick
directly to the frame and wiping it off
Well, for a touch-up job,
I got a color that's good enough.
What I learned from doing this was that yellow is critical—
just about three earwax-scraper-fulls of yellow made
the color match jump forward dramatically.
Since I didn't write down the total amount,
I can't really say what proportion three earwax-scraper-fulls represents,
so it's not particularly useful information.
The pink color isn't made from pink + white,
but rather from clear red + white as the base.
↑After painting, I wet-sanded with 2000-grit paper and painted again,
then finished with a clear coat,
so the paint film won't peel even if you spray it with parts cleaner.