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

what's up guys welcome back to classic octane i am taylor so today is finally the day that i'm going to record a how-to video on painting a motorcycle so i'm going to be painting the gas tank also two side covers and the front fender the process is basically exactly the same for all the components so i'll probably just focus on the gas tank since that's the biggest one we're going to go through all the materials i'm going to use as well as every single step and process that i go through to get these things painted so let's dive into it so quick little disclaimer before we dive into the tools and materials i'm going to be using this is a process that i've developed over the last couple of years that is still a budget paint job it's still using tools that are readily available it's using materials that are not crazy expensive it's not cheaping out on everything so i don't want you to think that it's you know bad quality materials it's just not um professional level i'm gonna say because it doesn't require you to have a big air compressor with a you know dryer and a high quality paint gun that kind of stuff like this is a very much diy do it in your garage paint job but hopefully you'll see in the results that you get 90 95 of the way to a professional paint job for a fraction of the cost this is an example of i use the exact technique i'm about to run through to paint this gas tank and you know i think the average person would be hard-pressed to uh to pick out this versus a quote-unquote professional level paint job but just wanted to throw that disclaimer on there this is technically a budget paint job so keep that in mind as we go so let's start off with the tools and materials i'm going to be using so the first part is tools the only real tool i'm going to be using is a d.a sander dual action sander this one happens to be pneumatic they make them an electric as well this is by no means required it's just going to help you know speed the process up give a little bit more consistent results i will throw a link to all of this stuff in the description below so you could 100 do this by hand i'm going to be using it in conjunction with a 220 grit sanding disc we're also going to be using a 400 grit sanding sponge as well as 600 grit sandpaper with one of these little foam sanding pads as well that's pretty much it when it comes to tools let's move on to the materials for materials we're going to start off with a good quality wax and grease remover this is super important to be able to remove any of the fine dust any fingerprints or grease or anything like that that's left over we want a nice clean surface before we spray any kind of primer or paint on there next is going to be just a simple automotive filler primer this one happens to be from dupli-color the next thing is going to be the actual color itself so let me just do a quick deep dive on why i pick the colors that i do so what i do is i go and i find a car or truck that has a very similar or the exact color that i want so for example the silver bike i just showed a second ago is a toyota cement gray the customer really liked the color it comes in like a tacoma and tundra and maybe a couple of other toyotas you really like that color so what i was able to do is just find the color code for that search for it online and find an aerosol touch-up paint that's exactly that color dupli-color didn't happen to make that one i got it from a company called touch-up express i have no affiliation with any of these people this just happens to be the one that i used and it turned out to be good quality so if you find a color that you like just search for it online by the color code and get yourself a good quality i would get two cans of whatever color coat you want and i would also recommend going this route because it makes it much easier to touch up the paint in the future so you can get like a little pen of exactly the same color and you know two years from now if you accidentally scratch your gas tank you can quickly go in and you know do a little touch-up paint and it won't be perfect but it's going to be super close as opposed to if you had some kind of custom color something that would be really hard to match so that's why i like to go with a kind of automotive quality paint and i happen to use dupli-color on a lot of projects as well i've had really good luck with it so far the last thing that's very important is going to be our clear coat so i like to go with an automotive quality 2k clear you can see it has 2k right here that means it's actually two parts that aren't mixed yet so i'll show you a little bit later on in the video we're going to use that little red button on the top to actually activate this can once it's activated you only have like maybe 24 or 48 hours to use it before it will actually harden in the can itself and be completely useless but this kind of clear will give you a much more durable you know clear coat that you can actually wet sand and wax and you know treat just like a standard car clear coat would be and it lays down nice and easy too so it's a little bit more expensive than a regular clear cut would be but i think the results are 100 worth it all right we can start working on this thing so mine's already a little bit stripped down if yours isn't yet you're going to want to remove your gas cap there's a little rivet that goes right through you can just tap that out from one side same exact thing for the latch itself get that out of the way also go ahead and remove your emblems on the side they literally pop right out there's two little metal kind of clips that go into these holes to hold them in place we also removed our petcock just to get that out of the way as well you could mask around that but it's five seconds to remove it so you might as well do that too what we need to do now is kind of assess the overall condition of the tank itself we're looking for any dings or dents or anything like that that we're going to need to repair this one is actually in really good shape luckily i'll walk you through really quick if you do have some dings and dents and stuff you have to repair you might have to do a little bit of work right here i can kind of see a little bit of ripples and stuff but we'll see when we strip it down a little bit what that looks like no major damage or anything no rust no kind of catastrophic issues we have to deal with so we're ready to go ahead and grab our da with that 220 grit sanding disc and i'm just going to blast over this whole thing we're not looking to get this thing down to bare metal if i had some rust spots or some bubbles where some rust might be underneath the paint 100 get some good quality paint stripper spray it on here go down to bare metal that is not at all necessary if the paint that's on the tank already is in pretty decent shape it's just the wrong color so i'm going to go ahead and start sanding we'll see what it looks like [Music] all right another tool i don't think i mentioned earlier is i'm going to be using a dust mask like this just standard kind of n95 dust mask for a lot of the sanding and then i'll be actually using a full respirator when we're spraying chemicals later i'm going to get extremely dusty in this process as well so just be prepared for that i'm going to go ahead and hit this with a little wax and grease remover on a microfiber rag just to remove a lot of the dust so we can see if we missed any spots we're just looking for anywhere that still is shiny we didn't hit that surface we want to remove any and all shiny spots because shiny means the paint's not going to stick very well or the primer is not going to stick very well in this case wipe all this off overall this tank is in pretty darn good condition but i think we are going to be doing a little bit yeah there's some little bumps and ridges right in here i'm actually not going to worry about that just yet we're going to address those in a later step right now yeah there's a a couple little parts and pieces i don't know if you guys can see it from that far away like right here where i didn't sand enough here along this edge that we still have some of that previous clear coat shining through so i'm to go ahead and hit those spots a second time we're going to wipe it all down and i'll bring you guys back because it's almost time to start masking now that everything's sanded down with the 220 i went ahead and knocked out the side covers and the front fender as well the front fender was chrome you don't want to paint over a shiny chrome nothing's going to stick to it so you want to make sure to scuff that up really well now we just need to mask off the gas cap area because we want to keep that bare metal but we want to paint the latch mounting so make sure you don't mask over that part we'll throw a little piece of tape over where the petcock goes as well everything's masked off i'm going to go ahead and hit it again really thoroughly with the wax waxing grease remover 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 could use any like you just want to do like a lint-free cloth you don't want there to be any little hairs or anything getting stuck in here because guess what those will show up in the end paint job okay so now i'm no longer going to touch it on any of this important surface the mounting point back here is going to be fine and anywhere underneath is going to be fine because those are less crucial but again i'm going to set this up outside just so we can get a little bit of airflow and we're going to hit it with probably three light to medium coats of this primer so i'm gonna do a pretty light coat just to give us a base we're gonna wait 10 minutes between each coat so relatively i'm going to call it a medium to light coat in the beginning go a little bit heavier on the second and third coat just to make sure you're not getting any runs you don't want to go too heavy in one spot but also you want to get really good coverage and this is a filler primer as well so we want it to build up a decent amount so we have some to work with when we start to finish sand and get our nice smooth surface so i'm gonna set this up outside get a couple of coats on it we'll see how it looks [Music] so i went ahead and let this sit overnight you can see i just dusted a very light coat of actually just a slightly darker primer on there for our guide coat now it's time for me to sand it so the part of the reason i left it overnight was because i am right at the kind of threshold as far as temperature goes you're really not supposed to paint or primer or anything when it's below 60 degrees yesterday we were in the mid 60s today i don't even know that we're going to get to 60 so i'm going to have to do the rest of my painting and everything inside so i'm going to set up kind of a temporary paint booth kind of thing and i got my little heater going so that we can make sure we keep this area you know above 60 degrees i'm also going to add a little bit more drying time in between coats to compensate for that as well so i got my 400 grit sanding sponge i'm going to start to sand this whole thing down the purpose of this guide coat is to be able to tell us where we've sanded and also you know as you sand along if you see a dark spot that stays you know that that's now a low spot that you either need to keep sanding until it's gone or what we might end up having to do is use a little bit of glazing putty but i'll cover that when we get there so i'm gonna start sanding it and we'll see how this thing looks [Music] so i spent about i don't know 10 or 15 minutes sanding this thing this is 100 uh the most important step out of all of them uh you've probably heard the saying before but like the key to a good paint job is all in the prep work almost none of it is actually spraying the paint it's all this step if i didn't do a guide coat i would have a very difficult time figuring out where the low and high spots were on this gas tank it looked pretty good it was even black before and i had to like get in the light to be able to see these little marks but this guide coat makes it super easy where we've sanded down to that original black paint that's our high spots this is a body line this is a body line so we expect to see that these low spots right here need to be filled in or they're going to be very obvious and very wavy in our paint especially the darker the color you're going to go with the more likely it's going to be to show those imperfections so what i'm going to use is a product from bondo it's called glazing and spot putty so the idea of this is it's super thin i mean we're not building up a ton of material here all we're looking for is like tenths of a millimeter thick just to level this out so if you have a bigger problem area you need to fix you can use a more traditional style bondo and bondo gets a really bad rap for like people thinking that that means the repair was done cheaply or badly uh pretty much every single paint job uses bondo uh the key is just not going super super thick with the bondo you don't want to go and have a you know golf ball sized dent and just smash a whole bunch of bondo in there and sand it down because it's going to eventually separate and crack and fall off and that's where bondo gets a bad wrap if you're using it very thin and very lightly uh bondo is a great product there's a reason it's been around for like you know 50 years so let me get a little um kind of applicator putty knife i don't know what you would call it and show you how i'm going to apply this glazing putty i've got my little tube here and then i have a little plastic i'm going to call it a putty knife it's a little bit flexible so the idea here is i can kind of match that contour and we're going to spread it in as thin as we possibly can but also you want to make sure you get enough to you know fix the problem that you have because what we don't want to have to do is come back and apply more later i'm just looking for as smooth as an application as possible you can also put it right on the blade itself here and 90 of this is going to be sanded off in the next step so you don't have to worry about it being you know absolutely perfect we're just trying to make sure we hit all those low spots like a little ding right there looks like and your hands are actually going to be a lot more of a tool than even your eyes are at this point and you'll almost never get it perfect on the first go-around that's kind of the the most time consuming part of paint jobs is the wait for stuff to dry sand it see if you did a good enough job if not repeat the application and keep going over and over again so this is a little low spot right here that i noticed there's also another one or two on this side so we'll want to make sure to get those addressed at the same time i don't think i noticed any more that might be a little one so because our temperature is a little bit low we're gonna have to probably give this i would say 45 minutes to an hour to dry we don't want to try and sand it before it's ready to go so i'm going to turn my little heater on we'll come back in about an hour see how we did so this stuff has taken forever to dry in this temperature but this side's doing well i kind of started on this piece to make 100 sure but all i'm doing is continuing with our 400 grit sanding sponge i don't know if i covered why you use a sponge instead of just a sheet of sandpaper the idea is the sponge kind of cushions where your fingers are so that you're not sanding in you know with three pressure points it kind of evens out the pressure of your hand and makes it easier to get a smooth surface so for this one right here i'm just gonna sand kind of right over it the idea is to just blend that spot in with the surrounding area so that you have kind of a perfectly smooth transition so just switch up a couple different angles you can start to check it feeling that with my hand my gut is telling me it's actually still just a little bit low i can feel just the smallest amount so we're probably going to touch that one up again so i'll just stop on that one for now move down here and i have my little air gun over here too but as this sponge gets a little clogged you can blow it out i've sanded all the spots down to what i think is pretty decent honestly i think this side is going to be good i think i'm going to have to do a little bit more work here to get that figured out but at this point i just wiped it all down with wax and grease remover now i'm going to hit it with another coat of primer same exact primer we've been using which is going to help fill in any fine sanding scratches and give me a nice clean starting point to start this process all over again until this thing is perfect primer's all dry it's looking pretty darn good i think there's a small there's a very small ding right here that i missed so i want to note that do a little bit more skim coat on it now the idea here is i'm just kind of going all over the entire surface really just trying to make it nice and uniform it's feeling pretty darn good if you're just looking for anywhere with like a little extra buildup of primer or anything like that it's okay if we go through because i am going to dust this with one more light coat of primer before we put any kind of color on it it's looking pretty darn good so i'm gonna keep doing that i'm still using my 400. once i get it all nice and even i will hit it with one last coat of primer like i just mentioned once that's dry i'm going to switch over to 600 grit before we hit our first color coat ready to move on to the last step before color that's going to be 600 grit on our little sanding sponge just going to wrap it around and i'm just going to run around this thing and just kind of lightly hit all the surface this is just to remove any imperfections in the primer coat anything that may have fallen in or you know small contaminations anything like that all of the you know heavy work is already done you know i'll be like really smoothing everything out so we're not trying to remove a ton of material here we are finally ready for some color so i got my paint booth set up which is definitely not uh just my workbench with a curtain on it that's for sure i put the tank on a swiveling stool with some paper on it so that i can actually turn it and paint both sides nice and evenly without having to touch the tank itself i have my front fender just kind of on a small box right here with the sides taped off that we don't want to be green that's ready to go and i do have actually both side covers uh just set up off camera because i'm going to be painting those as well so the first thing we're going to actually do is paint the underside of the gas tank so the underside is not very important for obvious reasons but we don't want to leave it just primer colored i'd like for it to at least be green so i'm just going to dust that with a light to medium coat we'll probably just do one coat underneath so we don't use a ton of paint i just want it to be green so it matches the rest so i'm going to go ahead and knock that out and i'm going to probably have to give it 10 15 minutes since it's going to be sitting on that fresh paint when we go to do that so i'm going to knock out the bottom side of this i'm also going to do the back side of both side covers with just one light coat then we'll move on to the important stuff which is painting the rest of it we're ready to start painting the top side so i'm just going to go nice and light the color is going to look funky it's going to look like neon green for the first couple of coats but don't worry it will get much darker as we continue to add coats 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 [Applause] ready for coat number two [Applause] an important thing to note is 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'll get a super heavy spray in that first you know half a second and it can put way too much paint on and cause a run or cause a kind of a weird looking spot so just start off the tank and kind of sweep over trying to maintain a consistent distance away the whole time another quick note is uh when you feel the cans starting to get low which these cans don't last terribly long which is why i recommend at least buying two don't keep spraying with it because if you are spraying and you kind of go any bit of an angle when it starts to empty out it will start to like uh spit and kind of stutter or sputter a little bit and that can cause some kind of weird extra little droplets to hit it and give you an uneven finish so when you feel it getting kind of low if you're going to be tilting the can at all it's better to just move on to your next game so here's a little look at how it's going this should be all of our color that we need you can see it's got a decent reflection on there we have not clear coated this at all yet so we've got 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 that your color is very evenly laid down everything on mine looks pretty darn good it looks like two cans was just enough to do a tank a front fender and both side covers we were i was a little worried we were going to run out but so far so good so i'm actually going to let this sit overnight i'll bring you back in the morning and we'll hit it with some clear so i went ahead and let it sit over the weekend i just can't fully cure there's really no reason to wait that long it just happened to work out that way for me so now i'm ready to kind of look over everything nice and close what i'm looking for is any uh drips anywhere where we like splattered and have like a huge drop of paint anything like that luckily i'm not seeing any issues whatsoever that we need to address everything looks really good paint went down nice and even i don't have any complaints on this so if we did have an issue this is where i would take i would say 2000 grit you might be able to do like sixteen hundred i would probably start with two thousand uh you can either do a wet or dry i probably recommend doing it wet wet the sandpaper you know dunk it in some water get a little spray bottle and the water just acts like a little bit of lubrication and with 2000 grit sandpaper you just go over it until you get that nice smooth finish so you remove that little drip or run and everything is nice and even again and you're going to be good to go luckily we took our time and i don't have to worry about any of that so we're ready to move on to clear coat so the first thing i'm going to do is hit everything with a fresh rag and our wax and grease remover just for any little dust or anything like that that may have fallen on it and of course we were touching it with our hand which we can leave little fingerprints and those are gonna show up in our clear coat we want all this to be perfectly clean cool and i'll go ahead and wipe down my fender and side covers as well so to activate our clear coat we just need to remove this little red button from the cap just like that we're gonna place it on the bottom there's like a little post sticking out and we're gonna press down just like that until it goes all the way in i like to kind of hold it press down now we're going to shake it for i would say at least a minute maybe two minutes make sure all that activator and everything is all nicely mixed and then we're ready to spray so this clear coat make sure you have a good quality respirator don't just wear a dust mask this stuff is very very toxic that's why there's literally extreme danger right on the front of it you do not want to be breathing this stuff in so i'm going to be doing basically the same technique we did with the color it's you know don't go too crazy heavy on the coats we'll start off with a nice you know i would say light to medium and we're gonna do a full coat wait 10 to 12 minutes in between and keep going and i'm just going to keep doing coats until i run out of clear so we'll probably do i would guess three maybe four probably four total coats so here she is after i'm gonna call this three and a half uh coats and why i'm calling it a half coat is once the can gets really low just like i mentioned with the color you don't want to have that can too you know horizontal otherwise it can start to splatter so for the fourth coat i really just kept the can vertical and kind of dusted the sides and a little bit over the top and same goes for the fender as well but you can see the finish we were able to get you know for uh in the garage no paint booth rattle can paint job i think it looks pretty darn good and it's only going to get better as it dries so you can kind of see there's a little bit of i guess you'd call that orange peel or something like that in there right now this clear actually is self-leveling so as this clear dries it will actually smooth itself out a little bit you can probably see in this tank i painted this with the exact same clear coat and it's much less kind of ripples in there so a lot of that works itself out as it dries but i am extremely happy with the result i think this thing looks really really good i don't have any complaints so i'm gonna go ahead and let this sit for honestly probably two days just because i don't have a reason to touch it or move it or anything before then you're going to want to give it i would say 24 hours at least before you really start to handle it just to make sure everything has plenty of time to cure everything is good to go worst thing possible would be to like have this thing you know with a big old fingerprint in it or something because you got you know impatient and picked it up or moved it or something like that so i'm just gonna leave it all right here drying for the next couple of days and i'm gonna call this thing good so one thing you can do just like i mentioned with the color code is if you do have a run like a little sag something like that you can wet sand this um to clean that up so once this is totally cured you can go back with some like 2 000 grit maybe even a little bit higher and just wet sand it very gingerly and you can work out a lot of improv imperfections you'd be kind of surprised at how how many mistakes you can fix after the fact you just don't want to go too aggressive you don't want to sand through this clear coat back into you know the color and then you'll have a dull spot so you just got to be careful i would wait honestly probably a couple of weeks before you do any kind of like compound or polish or anything because you want the uh clear coat to be 100 cured i know some car clear coats they you know can take up to like a month or two to be like officially like fully cured so you just don't want to go in there before everything's totally hardened you want to give it a little bit of time to uh to set up but i'm pretty stoked so that's what i'm going to call in this video because all the hard work is done so now we're just waiting for this thing to dry i'm also going to wait a day or two before i remove that masking tape and reinstall the gas cap and stuff just so i don't cause any imperfections or anything in the clear coat while it's curing i think that's going to be it so i hope this video kind of showed you guys my technique maybe gave you a little bit more confidence to get what i think is a really acceptable quality paint job at home with you know easy to find materials that i will uh link all in the description below if you guys have any questions or anything let me know in the comments appreciate you guys watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Classic Octane

Views: 116,964

Keywords: Honda, CB550, Cafe, Racer, Build, Project, CB750, CB350, CB360, Yamaha, Motorcycle, Garage. Shop, Update, Triumph, hardtail, bobber, chopper, welding, fab, springer, custom, trail, riding, dual, sport, pit, bike, monkey, Stunt, gloves, cam, corder, burnout, handlebar, stunts, stunting, wheelie, hd, drift, Xv1100, XvS650, Harley, Davidson, motorcycle, review, comparison, scooter, fix, tips, tricks, tools, painting, glueing, soldering, design, fabricating, solution, motovlog

Id: 7vDFUsqibRM

Length: 35min 7sec (2107 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020