"2002 REBUILD"
1969 TRIUMPH BONNEVILLE
Original owner Art Maggio, Winter Park, FL


Tell me what you think of my bike:
Art Maggio, email: avmaggio@earthlink.net.



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Now the process started all over again. I completely disassembled every thing but the wheels and the lower end of the engine. I gathered together numerous pieces for rechroming and carried them to the platers. There they gave me an estimate of the cost. After the paramedics revived me I reconsidered some of my wish list and settled on what I could handle. It's been a long time since I had anything chrome plated.





I ordered more parts and made a trip to the paint supply place. I found the folks at Ben's Paint supply to be most helpful. I decided that I wanted to paint in urethane so I bought the materials that I would need to paint all the black stuff. An old Triumph has lots of black stuff. Brackets, clamps, frame rails, nick knacks and and brick-a-brac. All this stuff needed to be stripped, treated with Ospho ( rust inhibitor) and primed.














I used an epoxy primer. Most of this stuff did not need any "body work" as it's hard and small. The exception was the oil tank. One of the things which I had done earlier during one of the modifications was to weld a "tunnel" into the side of the tank. This had to be undone, requiring more welding, filling, blocking, and sanding. Once every thing was prepared I spent a day shooting black. I got a few bugs (always) and a few runs( not always but given the fact that it rained off and on the whole day I guess that should have been expected). All in all things turned out fairly well.









The next hurdle was the tank and mudguards (that's fenders to us folk on this side of the pond). I had called numerous suppliers trying to find original color paint for the tank and fenders (Olympic Flame was the name) but only one company, Don Hutchinson in MA., had it. The problem was that what he had was lacquer and he could not supply it in urethane. After much thought I finally ordered a pint of it in lacquer and approached Ben's about matching the paint in urethane. The first problem we ran into was that when we checked the lacquer paint we realized that it was a translucent paint. That meant that the color was as much a matter of application as it was a matter of mixing. Joy, the rep. at Ben's, gave me numerous suggestions about application, and then mixed a pint of urethane that was their best effort at matching the lacquer. I also bought all the catalyst, hardener, clear, and reducer that I would need and went home to paint test panels.

The paint I used was PPG Radiance. It is what is called a three stage, two part paint. This means that it requires three layers  (ground coat, color coat, and clear coat) and two materials mixed together( paint and catalyst) plus reducer. There is a strict sequence of timed events which must be followed precisely. Mostly it's a pain and I was very glad that I practiced on the test panels first. The base coat is silver and the color coat is dark red with a hint of yellow. You apply the silver until you get good coverage but you apply the red until you get the right shade. You can always add one more coat but you cannot take off a coat if you go too far. Further more, how heavy you apply each coat also effects the shading, so practice made a big difference.

Another problem was that the tank and fenders were two tone. The tank had a silver stripe down the center and the fenders had a red stripe. This meant taping and masking. The difficulty was that the paint called for all coats of primer, base, color and clear to be applied with in a twenty four hour time frame. This meant applying masking tape to paint which was very fresh. The PPG tech sheets stated that taping could begin one hour after applying the silver. During my testing I found this not to be true. For the final painting I began shooting primer at 4:00 PM and stopped with the silver coating at about 9:00 PM. This allowed me over night for the silver to cure. Masking began at about 9:00 AM the following day and I squeaked in my last coat of clear at about 4:00 that after noon.














I was pretty well satisfied with the final results. I got a little dirt, no runs and good gloss. This paint can be color sanded and compounded to remove imperfections but I am hoping that I won't have to do that. Although sanding/compounding is normal SOP for this paint, I suspect that it reduces it's life. We will see.