Blasted!
Easily the worst/leastfun/most tedious/biggest PITA part of building a Shitbike is getting a frame ready for painting.
On all of the SB builds so far, the frame started with factory paint. Removing parts from the bike is mostly (effff you, siezed bottom brackets) easy. The real challenge of getting a bike ready to be repainted is stripping them down to the bare metal. To date, I’ve used a combination of chemicals and hand sanding to get everything off of a frame.
Being exposed to nasty stripping chemicals, the fine particles of paint, metal, or composites while sanding, and the sheer time that it takes all make up a heaping plate of ‘no thanks’. In a word, it sucks.
If I had to estimate, completely stripping a painted frame manually can take up to 30 hours of work.
After The Mediocritatum, I asked myself ‘Why am I spending the most amount of time on the least fun part of this process?’ After that, I swore that I wouldn’t be stripping frames (the metal ones, at least) by hand anymore. I would get them media blasted.
Turns out all you need to do is find someone a blasting cabinet big enough for bike frames, give them some money, and come back the next day to get beautifully raw frames that are paint ready.
There are some small considerations to this approach.
It costs money
But saves SOOO much time
Media blasting will reset the grain of the metal. If I wanted to have a grain pattern show through a transparent color layer, like with the Ketchum Krewzers, I would need to reset the grain by hand
You need specific media to blast a carbon/composite frame. This is because the materials and resins that bond the carbon together will be softer than most blast media. Blasting with a harder media than carbon will eat away at the frame, rather than just the paint. Watch this video for more detail: strip paint from carbon fiber fast!
Overall, I am super happy I went with the blasting route. It saved me a HUGE amount of time across the six frames and forks I had blasted. It’s safe to say I will not be going back to the manual method. Now I just need to paint and build them!
