Tdc

TDC

Paint by numbers

Kevin Cameron

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MOTORCYCLE paint and painting started out bravely enough. I took my first machine all to pieces, painted the steel parts royal blue and red, and reassembled it. I ought to have been pleased, but I wasn’t.

Underneath all that soft spray-can color, I knew that my bike was still the same junky BSA 125 Bantam that it had been before I sprayed it. That took the heart out of whatever patience I might have had for the tedious processes of paint removal, surface prep, priming, and the endless painting and wet-sanding that followed. I couldn’t get interested in beauty only .004-inch deep-especially when the tiniest contact between supposedly dry paint and some part of the outer world left a glaring gouge that then had to be sanded and fussed over all over again.

When I started going to races, I learned quickly that the concept of “super-sano Cal Kustom” applied to more than just Little Deuce Coupes. It seemed that lovely, mouth-watering paint was the first item on every California racer’s agenda, followed only later by such incidentals as brakes, engine, chassis and tires. But ideological protection against this syndrome already existed; the men who ran for speed records on the dry lakes disdainfully coined the phrase, “If it won’t go, chrome it.”

My attitude hardened over the years even if my paint seldom did. I carefully shot three coats of lustrous black on my 1971 H1R Kawasaki chassis, only to have it flake, scratch and peel at the slightest touch. Next time, I painted it with a brush. If there was enough time for paint, there was no money, and vice versa, so usually the rider himself would spread newspapers in a remote part of the shop and do the painting himself.

There were historical precedents. Dr. Carcano, the Italian engineer who designed the great Moto Guzzi horizontal-Singles and the frightening V-Eight, not only refused to paint his bikes, he would not even permit gel-coat to be used on the fiberglass parts. All that gloss was, he noted, just extra weight making no positive contribution to lap times. Mack McConney, the curmudgeonly Boston-area Triumph dealer who pointed so many of us towards bike racing, himself refused to bother with painting. “Just rub a little Castrol R on it to stop it rusting,” he’d say.

“Ah, but the sponsors (what sponsors?) like shiny things, so you have to work as hard on the paint as on the ports,” I was told. And some of those glossy California bikes were undeniably fast as well as pretty. Okay, okay, if there’s time after the engines are in the chassis, we’ll get it all painted. If.

And so one year at Daytona, there was Californian Bud Aksland, watching 750 practice at the fence when my rider, Nick Richichi, went by at a good clip. Bud said, as though speaking to himself, “Now who do you suppose that is, going about a million miles an hour? Could it be one of those black and scrungy East Coast bikes?”

In 1970 we were given one of the previous year’s Kawasaki AlRAs. This was beautiful to look at, but it was just an AlR-and all that implies-with a gorgeous facelift. It had “Paint by Molly,” which in this case was swoopy green and cream epoxy paint under a rockhard topcoat of some kind. It was beautiful and it stayed that way even if you inadvertently dripped brake fluid on it.

Naturally, we moved heaven and earth to get this guy Molly’s telephone number, so we could all send off stacks of fairings to be similarly immortalized. But such beauty is expensive, we found; each paint job cost as much as three sets of new cylinders, or four cranks. And when you consider that in 1971 we crashed five new fairings off my 500, you can see why not one of them carried paint by Molly into the trackside trashcans I stuffed them all ihto.

Exhaust pipes were a separate issue. The first ones from Japan had their welds ground smooth, were chromed, and rigidly mounted. It was never clear whether it was the grinding or the hydrogen embrittlement from the chrome or the rigid mounting that made these pipes crack, but they did, every one. Later, all pipes were flat black, springmounted, and lasted several races. After some bad experiences with highly touted hot-rod header paints, we discovered that a durable black finish could be obtained by using Rustoleum Barbecue Black, and that went on for several years until a startling new trend came along: no paint. At first, this just looked unfinished to us, but shortly, it became the “factory” look-plain steel colored blue by the heat of the welding. It looked as though the pipes were so hot off the dyno that there’d been no time to paint them (often true). Racy! Of course, a couple of trips to the races on an open trailer made unpainted pipes look like junkyard mufflers. Today, someone in Italy has developed a heat-resistant clearcoat for pipes that keeps that factory look rustless and dyno-fresh for years after the pipes are obsolete.

The correct approach is to have someone with visual sense come to your shop as soon as the new racebike arrives, design a paint scheme, and take away the parts to be painted professionally. Factory bikes are beautiful, and you know that 20 minutes after an awful crash, such a machine will look perfect again with new fairing, tank, pegs, bars, controls and seat-all from fresh stock. On the other hand, you also know that meticulous builders of racebike scale models go to great lengths to obtain what they call “the operational look,” streaking their fairings with simulated brake swarf and exhaust discoloration, or grinding the handlebar and footpeg ends to simulate crash damage. Which has the greater appeal? And which is the “real” reality? The perfect, plastic-model look that sponsor-sensitive pro teams have to strive for? Or the used, end-of-the-season, bugs-on-the-windscreen look that the model-makers seek?

I can appreciate both-so long as no one asks me to do any of the painting. □