It's been a month since I've last posted. It is a challenge/juggle to find the time to give to my bike along with all the other day-to-day work and projects that I manage. I now understand Nikola's predicament with his own bike; he literally spends all of his time fixing and giving TLC to his customers' bikes which leaves little time for his Shovel .
On top of this juggling of time, what I've been working on has been a bit more labor intensive and time consuming--
These are the cylinders. They were painted black, and then (I imagine, painstakingly) finished with red paint on each and every cylinder fin. In general my aesthetic is simple and clean, therefore I wasn't digging the red trim. Both the cylinders and the heads, which are constructed of iron, were painted this way and before I could repaint, I had to sand off the black and red paint which took a bit of time. As you may know, sanding and painting aren't one-time deals. They are each a process. When I sanded, I used mostly two grades of sandpaper: 60 and 150 grit. This took several hours. Then I used black engine paint, and I gave each piece two coats of two coats, and they needed to dry completely in between sprayings, so this took me over a week to complete. I started with the cylinders.
This is what the cylinder looks like painted with black engine paint. [Mostly] sanded down to the iron on the left, and new black paint on the right:
Before any of the sanding or painting could commence, I had to tape up all the pukas (holes) so that debris nor paint could get inside, otherwise there'd be trouble in the engine. Taping took a long time too--because of the differently shaped areas and the residual oil neutralizing the adhesive on the tape. Eventually I learned an effective taping method.
Here I am, sanding the black paint off of the heads (which sit above the cylinders and under the rocker boxes) whose pukas I had to make sure were covered with painter's tape.
