1985 XJ700XN After Paint

Just finished getting all my ducks in a row with the paint and I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Waiting for clear coat to cure so please forgive the orange peel.

Here's some pics;



Reason I post this here is because the entire paint job was done entirely with rattle cans. The exact details are as follows;

Started by stripping and sanding major blemishes in tank, there are a few dents but I don't particularly mind. After it was clean and prepped I sprayed a few coats of a self-etching primer, which was then covered by a white base coat for the stripe and color. Now the one thing I would have changed would have been to stay away from the metallic paint that I used. I bit off a little more than I could chew thinking it would work, and to my credit I think worked well enough, but in the end it did have many issues concerning wrinkling, curing, and a few of the cans themselves being defective (which sprayed propellant on a wet coat and melted the paint on the right side causing some running) so despite that and the fact there are some light spots, I think it panned out okay.




The clear coat used is the Ultra Glamour 2k Clear, little pricey and potentially hazardous to spray in a poorly ventilated area, but the two-part mix they use hardens up and sands very well. All in all I think it turned out ok, as far as the side covers and fenders went, I used the same color but simply used a white krylon (either dualbond or their regular paint) on top of the previous red and saw greater success but I experienced similar issues. The color paint I used was a metalcast anodized blue metallic spray paint I picked up at autozone. In hindsight the effect isn't that great when not sprayed directly on to metal (even though my test samples proved otherwise so who knows) and in reality I would have rather just used any rustoleum spray or liquid paint instead of the metalcast. On top of this was sprayed a "Clear Effect" paint that contained a green/blue chameleon flake that looks absolutely stunning in direct sunlight. I'm kicking myself for not using a plain old navy blue rustoleum spray with that flake because I think that would have looked even better.




I'm ballin on a budget so forgive the imperfections, but it should be known that if you're striving for a perfect automotive or otherwise large paint job, you shouldn't be using spray paint in the first place. I've been playing with spray gun setups but nothing reliable came of it so this was my solution. I'm color blind and blue is a color I'm pretty at home with so forgive me if you don't think it fits the bike but for what it's worth, I'm content. Hope you enjoy.