Yam RD 250 Paint Thread

Hey guys!thank you so much for your support!
I will follow your guidance on the prep of the 2K,i guess i will need to lay down another coat on the tank just to be sure that its well protected.
How long would you let the 2K till its re paintable?
Dupli says 7hours for hardness.
Here are some little snapshots of my parts,i will post the whole process next week!!

nice job

Thanks man!your support saved my butt!!

After you have the final coat on, a polish will make it shine even more. I put about 5 coats of Wax on the Magna tank and fenders and it really shines. I had one slight run on the front fender and almost 0 orange peel, one or 2 little tiny bits of floaty stuff landed on the clear but buffed right out. I am getting asked now to do paint for a bunch of folks and I am trying to decide if I should now build a paint shed with heat, lights etc next to the garage to do more, or just say no, LOL.

is there a good tutorial on buffing and waxing?
How long should i wait to do that?read a month is the time for 2K to fully cure and get buffed.

Not sure if there is a polishing tutorial. I had to turn the bike over so I waited the 48 hrs on the Spraymax instructions and did the waxing, Not sure but one of the other folks should chime in on the best time. I used a rubbing compound very sparingly and then put the wax too it with just microfiber rags and elbow grease, I didn't use the power buffer.

Wow, that looks excellent! You should be pleased! You should be able to get it much, much better with a little more work. You are definitely past all the hard stuff, and you should find the rest a piece of cake. 24 hours should be way plenty of cure time to sand out that orange peel and scotchbrite easy to damage areas. Put down another coat or two of clear, and you can sand and polish everything to perfection. This is the time to be careful. No doubt you are feeling the pressure of every additional stage of work endangering all of the accumulated work already done. One moment of carelessness can put you all the way back to square one! You do not have to sand out 100% of the orange peel to add more clear, but you do need to hit everything with the scotchbrite. Once you have enough clear applied to have confidence you will not accidentally sand through, you can sand everything slick and polish. Looks like you will have an absolutely beautiful result!

You look like you have a lot of peel on some of the parts but you should be easily able to remove 100% of it. Your oil tank looks like it needs a good bit more clear, but the top of the fuel tank looks like it has plenty so keep this in mind when adding clear and of course when sanding! Remember, I am just looking at pics and guessing! Be careful to dress up the gas cap mountings with a hobby knife or file or something - the paint looks pretty thick and probably you will have to carefully remove paint to keep it from chipping maybe a big chip off when fitting the cap - some are surprisingly precise fitting. Cutting and polishing is not hard, but you do have to be careful. There are a lot of different preferences, but this is what I do:

I avoid sanding close to edges and hardware like the gas cap mountings unless there is some defect that needs fixing like trash or a drip or something (or is dry and HAS to be polished to be shiny) because as long as the clear is shiny, orange peel is not very noticeable in corners and at edges. The buffer can very quickly cut through corners and flanges, so avoid those areas, and if you need to get close, protect them with some tape. I usually use #1500 very wet and a flexible sanding block to keep the surface uniform. Use a continuously flowing water supply like a garden hose so that any tiny grit that may be introduced is instantly rinsed away. It is easy to create dreadful scratches as you are leaving a very smooth surface with such fine sandpaper. Lots of guys use finer sandpaper but I like the #1500.

Get a small pistol grip buffer. You can use a big electric one like used on cars, but they are very dangerous for small motorcycle parts!! Buffing wheels can catch instantly on your parts, and fling them over the fence into your neighbors yard before you realize anything has happened! So you have to be careful. There is a lot of good products out there - good ones are usually pretty expensive if you are used to buying car wax. You get what you pay for. A little goes a loooong way. Be careful polishing. The buffer will put considerable heat into your paint, and 2K needs very little so don't stay in one place - get the paint too hot and you will be starting over, but you have to be pretty careless to have this problem - move around and come back, do a small area at a time.

Here is the stuff I use. Only use one pad for one product - don't mix. I use the wool pad with the coarse compound after sanding, and the fine compound (often referred to as "glazing compound") with the foam pads to remove swirls left in dark colors from the wool pad. It takes me probably an hour + to sand and polish a gas tank for example.

You should have EVERY expectation to get your parts to look as good as this Triumph tank! This one is ready for a first coat of wax!

thanks mobius!i´m relly really pleased with the result,it was hard work,but wort it!

so did i understand correctly:

i scotchbrite/sand my cured 2K clear,lay another 1 or 2 coats depending on the surfaced yet achieved

let the pieces cure for 48 hours and sand them with 1500 grit till they are perfectly slick.do you do a step down 800-1200-1500 grit or do you jsut start with 1500?

wool pad with coarse compound and then foam pad with "glazing" compound

when do you wax?what does waxing mean?is it applied before buffing and polishing or in the end?

my main concern is sanding over the thinner clear on the decals.this will be the place to be really really carefulm ( and the edges).

I have never touched ANY cleared surface with anything coarser than than 800 grit, and that is only to re-clear. If you're going to cut and buff, don't start with anything coarser than 1200. This is also why I won't shoot with rattle can, no control over air flow to prevent orange peel.

+1, Though if you are shooting more clear, #600 will not cause any issues, #800, or #1000 will be fine too. Generally I use the coarsest sandpaper practical for the task at hand because 1) the coarser the grit, the easier it is to control the shape of the surface and 2) I hate sanding, and coarser grits are faster. Anything coarser than #600 for a clear re-coat gets to where the sandpaper scratches become a bit challenging for the clear to fill in without afflicting the resulting surface. If you have excellent equipment and know how to use it, you can achieve very smooth glassy results, and the surface texture you are coating has more of an impact. For me with my gear and skills, I am fine with the #600, but if I got slicker results, I probably would find I wanted a smoother starting surface and shift to finer paper. I expect your spray cans do not offer the best control, so the surface roughness you are spraying on is a bit less critical. In any event, when in doubt, go fine!

As far as the polishing goes, for me I like to use coarser paper to help keep the body contours as perfect as possible. It is a fact that you can use #600 before polishing, but it is vastly more work to do the polishing because you have a much rougher surface to mow down and it takes longer! By the same token, you can use #2500 (or finer) paper and polishing is that much easier, but it is also easier to deform the surface contours. Mind you, these are pretty fine points and largely just a matter of preference. Great results can be had with variations of the path outlined here, I just list what I do for reference.

There is no need to step through various grits. For your next clear coat, just sand the big areas flat directly with #600 ( or #800-#1000), scotchbrite the rest and clean and paint. Same for the sanding before polishing - you are removing only very tiny amounts of paint - in fact as little as possible, and #1500 will cut very fast. Remember, it only takes me about an hour+ to sand and polish a tank, so it is pretty easy. If you sand with a block (heavily recommended), sand a little and then dry completely. The surface has to be bone-dry to see the difference between the sanded and unsanded areas. You will see that the surface is very dull where sanded, but anywhere that has not been touched which will be shiny. Typically this can look like uniformly arranged tiny shiny dots which shows you have only cut down the high parts of the peel, and as you sand more, the dots will get smaller until they disappear. When they do, you are done. It only takes a very little bit of sanding unless the peel is really heavy. Obviously the parts that already look slick and glassy will need less sanding than the more orangepeely parts. Just in case this was not clear, you are only sanding to straighten the surface. You are sanding flat the tiny ripples of the orange peel, and you will be leaving all the tricky areas in corners and edges alone - no scotchbrite - leave hard to get to areas alone and shiny, mostly the orange peel in these areas is not worth fussing with. Remember, everything you sand will require buffing out to be made shiny. So if you cant easily and safely run the buffer in there you are usually better off leaving it than trying to perfect it. It is very easy to damage adjacent areas when focusing on improving a hard to access area. You get the spot you are working on beautiful, only to realize you burned through a nearby corner with the other side of the buffing wheel you weren't paying attention to!

Obviously you have to be very careful around any edges or corners like the step at the edge of the decals. It is possible to "bury" decals in clear so that you can sand out the step, but depending on the thickness of the decal, it can take a lot of clear. Keep this in mind when you sand and also when you shoot more clear. In the pics, it looks like you have a good bit on the top of the tank for instance, but less on the sides. So maybe try to get extra on the sides where the decal step is to help protect it and minimize its appearance for polishing.

Wax is just car wax, - nothing to do with all this painting and polishing. Just car wax/polish you buy at the auto parts store to protect the paint on your car. I don't wax anything for about a month, but I see some guys wax right after polishing. In any event, keep wax of any kind far, far away until all of your painting is completely finished!! Very often after a month goes by I will find a little spot or two that I want to polish up a bit more and I put on a couple of coats of wax then.

so i decided the following:I WANT FINALLY TO RIDE THAT THING ,polishing will happen in winter,then i will clean the parts and do that since i plan to redo my wiring loom then anyways.
1 year of wait is just killing me,the 2K has a lready a nice shine to it,so i´ll keep it that way.
i will still ask question how i need to go about in winter when the bike gets that extra shine,hope you guys stick to me.

anyways i will still ask you guys the following:

had a mishap on my last 2K coat (oil tank),touched a hanging part with my shoulder (you should have heard me SWEARING ) which resulted in a uneven dimply part of the 2K (still has 2 coats of 2K under it).
what is the best way to refinishing that spot of 2K,i would it it carefully by hand with a 800 grit,then watersand it with 1500 grit till it "polished" out.

question 2: is there normally a cure time for the 2K to be fuel resistent or will it be "fuel proof" when its fully cured?

today i started putting the bike together,it is so beautiful to see stuff coming together which is completely DIY.

i also started putting the pics in order for the process yet to post.

I am no pro but if it were me I would sand that spot flat and shoot a layer of clear over the whole thing. Maybe it's not too deep and you could polish it out but you would have to be very careful and take your time as to not cut through to the color coat. I haven't painted metal in years it's mostly been guitars but the same rules should apply. Let's see a picture of it all together!

Thanks clem!

Not totally finished,ill do that tomorrow but here are some pics

You are doing good work and if you can take a pic of the spot we may be able to help with the fix better.

Here are some pics of the RD

Very nice. Great work Ryan. Perseverance pays off.

That looks very sharp, great work on the paint.

thank you guys for your support and help!as promised i will some pics of the progress.

as for the materials i used:

3 cans of Dupli Color Epoxy Primer (200ml)

7 cans (400 Ml) of Dupli Color Metallic Blue (its a Ford autocolor tone)

3-4 cans of 1K Dupli Color Clear coat (400 ml)

7 cans of Dupli Color Epoxy Clear Coat (200 ml)

full body suit, balaclava,mask with good filters


First i started purging the gasoline from my gas tank (prep for sandblasting) removing the paint from my headlight bucket and building stands for my parts out of wood and stuff i had lying around

then i got the parts from the sandblaster,luckily there was nearly no putty on the tank and on the oil tank so i could just start rightaway (some hours after i received the parts) to prime them with the epoxy paint.the other parts (plastic parts) were primed before with 1 K rattle can.

the epoxy rattle laid on so super sticky,super thick so i laid on 3-4 thin layers,the most crucial part was to cover all areas since the metal was completely blank.