Benjie's Seat and Tank Paint Cracking...Suggestions?

Hey everyone, I ordered a BCR tank and seat combo for my cb450 project about a year ago. After finishing the project the bike saw the light of day which is when I realized under better lighting that the black stripes (over perfect silver base) were cracking. I'm not sure if this is a technique thing, paint defect?? Its odd that ALL of the black paint and only the black paint is experiencing this defect.

I've contacted Benjie at BCR, poking him with emails asking for advice on what to do or what the cracking could be from. It has been over a month of email requests with absolutely no response Needless to say I'm a little fed up with the lack of customer service and quality after dropping so much money.

If BCR wont give me any advice or offer to redo the striping, would an automotive paint shop be able to redo the stripes or would they have to repaint from scratch?

Likely doing the same under the silver. It's on quite a bit thicker, and not breaking through.

Looks like your gel may be breaking.

Looks like lacquer checking. Possibly black lacquer was used for the stripes? Not too many folks using lacquer these days. The phenomenon is not exclusively for lacquer as the same effect can happen with incompatible materials. Regardless, you can't paint over it and not expect to have problems. I don't think there is an issue with the gelcoat, but you'll have to pretty much start back from scratch to ensure the problem is eliminated. You'll be able to tell if the problem is coming up from under the paint. Assuming it is just the black, you can simply sand all the black off and prep for new paint. If it IS in the gelcoat, I'd have to sand off all the gelcoat in order to ensure the problem won't reappear.

That's called crazing. Crazing can occur in one layer or all the way to the base metal. It occurs because of a host of issues- all at the paint shop's fault. It could be too much hardener in the clear coat, or they tried to speed dry the undercoat, or they didn't allow adequate flash time. It could be poor mixing of the paint. I suspect since they sprayed stripes over the base silver, then a clear over top, that they rushed the job. Unfortunately, nothing you can do here except to start over. That's a botched paint job, my friend.

Thanks for the input, everyone. After sending them pictures of the issue I'm at least beginning to understand why they won't return my emails; they'd have to admit fault and agree to repaint.