KTM Lucky Country touring bike restoration - 04

Well, I'm riding the restored KTM Lucky Country since a year now, but I haven't had the time to finish this series of posts, but I wanted to share the rest of the process because the result was very satisfying. 

So after removing all the paint, I proceeded to apply a couple of layers of primer (for metal). You can get such in spray doses. 

Sorry, I only have a couple of pics of the primer applied to the fork. But the same process applies for the rest of the frame. Pay attention to protect those areas you don't want the pain to get to with some paper tape (in the picture above you can see the tape applied at the brake holders).

For the frame paint I decided to go with some light pastel green, mimicking somehow the adventure/dust creme colors (typically sand/browns), but green.

You will see in the pics that I helped myself with a support jig. Nothing fancy, I was having some steel tubes at home and I welded this support in a couple of hours.

For this green I didn't want to spend a fortune in sprays, so I bought normal water-based paint for metals, and I apply it with the paint gun (compressor). Of this light green I did like 3 or 4 layers, I don't remember exactly.

The next challenge were the stickers. I searched the web for KTM stikers but they were all too big, mostly for motorbikes. So considering that the KTM logo is relatively easy to copy and cut, I gave it a try with some 3M foil and a cutter, but not to be used as stickers, but as mask for painting the logo.

The results were much better than originally expected.

Of course, I was limited only to the KTM logo, the "Lucky Country" was left in the past.

The process for is the following:

1) on top of the primer you paint an area with the background color you want to use for the logo. 

2) Once dry, you apply the sticker on top of it and you proceed to paint the rest of the component with the final color (in my case, the light green)

3) Once the final layers are dry, and before the final protective coating, you remove the stickers. The logo will show. 

After finishing with the logos, I proceeded to apply the protective coating. As I had a good experience with the paint gun, I bought a can of protective coating, but I went for a matt finishing instead of a glossy one, firstly because I thought it was going to match better with this green "desert" color, and secondly because it's much much easier to get a nice and homogeneous finishing in matt than in glossy. It's so much easier than if for whatever reason you later on need to do some corrections and apply the coating again, you can even do it with a roll and you won't see the difference once it dries. Very much recommended unless you absolutely want a professional glossy finishing.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results. In the next post I'll show you the final steps and how the bike is looking like after finishing the assembly.