Cleaning your frame is a good idea because even if you don't care how it looks you should at least de-rust it, otherwise the rust will continue to mess up your frame. Not a fast process, but it also weakens the frame, you should get rid of it.
I used a #0 fine grade steel wool (I'm not sure if the #0 etc. is a standard of grading steel wool, but it should still be labeled as fine grade). In the case of my frame, the steel wool didn't scratch the finish on my frame and that gives you a lot of lee-way when trying to get rust off of little spots. When you use steel wool you don't need to use the whole pad of steel wool and just tear off a small piece so you can focus your work on some spots. Steel wool has a few limitations, it's hard to get into the corners and small spots (if you have fancy lugging like I do, or rust on things by the bottom bracket (place for a kick stand, like I do)). You can, but I really don't recommend using a steel bristled brush, which will definitely get the rust out, but I think will almost definitely scratch your finish.
If you're trying to keep your workplace clean, take note that steel wool when you use it kind of sheds tiny pieces of steel, making a bunch of gray dust, and might also irritate your hand, so if you have leather work gloves (not the kind that use cloth, like gardening gloves) you might want to use them.
No pictures for the steel wooling, it's kind of not that interesting to look at.
Regular cleaning I did the good old fashon way.
With a toothbrush.
Now once again, this part is totally unneccessary if you just want to ride something. Of course, I just wanted something to ride on, but I was bored, so I did this.
Put a towel down, take an old tooth brush, mix some water with dish soap and go to town on it. Make sure that you dry it off though so it doesn't rust. A lot of stuff that may have looked like rust might have just been dirt in hard to reach places, which is a good reason to do this. There's a good reason why you should keep your bike clean, but having ridden a mountain bike for most of my life I don't mind the dirt.
A great reason to do this, is if you're going to homepaint (spraypaint) the frame. If you spraypaint over dirt, the spraypaint can flake off because the dirt would flake off.
Now I decided to spraypaint a few small areas in the frame, the areas that through paint chips and bare metal from steel wooling the rust spots mainly so that they wouldn't rust. For this purpose I used Rustolium (huh, go figure).
If you want to paint your frame, and money isn't an issue, I'd recommend powdercoating the frame. Powdercoating is really hard to come off and looks great, but it can run a little expensive, I had a friend's frame and fork powdercoated and it was $140, plus some if you got a special color like sparkles or something. Plus they sandblast the stuff you have powdercoated so that they do a good job for you.
A cheaper option it wetcoating it, but I suggest spraypaint touchups or powdercoating. The pricing runs the gambit between the two from $5 (spraypaint) to $140+ for powdercoating.
THINGS NOT TO PAINT:
1) Parts you won't see (the tube of the fork that goes into the frame)
2) Anything with threads on it
3) The inside of the frame (seatpost etc.)
Dropouts are fine, and anything else that doesn't have threads, the paint will wear off whenever it does. If you get it powdercoated, don't expect you get a nice paintjob with the decals still on the bike. At least not if you want it to look good.
If you're spraypainting, then you're not too concerned with looks and can mask off the decals, or spraypaint over them. If you want a good spraypaint job then you can sand down the frame, which is something I don't know about too much.
Chuck: Actually, just a rough sand will help, it makes the old paint act like a primer.
I used trusty orange masking tape that I had laying around to try and set the bounds of where I'd be spraypainting over this huge gash showing the metal. Note also that I spraypainted it outside and not over the towel inside.
An important thing is to try and paint with the surface you're painting face up as much as possibile or you might get dripage. Even though this is spraypainting, it still can look uglier than it needs to be. Try and apply two coats.
Now this kind of approach is nice if you're doing it for a while, or only have a few specks of paint missing, but my frame was full of chips and I was getting a little bored of painting small spots. So I decided to mask off the decals and try and do some spot paint, kind of eye-balling it.
The only thing I could complain about was that the Rustolium White is a little shinier and whiter than the frame's white. Which since I was contemplating an actual patch looking paint job. As you can see I masked off all the chrome, the decals, and stuffed the seatpost, fork tube and bottom bracket with paper towels and tape in order to make sure I didn't get any paint stuck in there.
Next: Wheels
No comments:
Post a Comment