Tank & Fender Paint Pt. 4

Here is where one of my main concerns was. I had to mask for the black paint, but only had a few small pictures to go by.  

Let me digress here for a minute. When I searched the Internet for 71 Triumph Daytona pictures so I could copy the paint scheme, everything that turned up had the correct colors, but the pattern was way different than I remembered it. More diligent searching eventually did produce a couple of pictures with the pattern I remembered. The only way I can explain this is that bikes sold in the UK (like this one) must have had the same colors, but a different pattern than those sent to the US. And since the vast majority of these bikes went to the US, pics of US bikes dominate the Google search results. Anyway, I took what measurements I could from the small pics of UK bikes

  Using a special vinyl tape made for automotive paint masking, I laid out the curves.  It is tricky to get the curves smooth and to get both sides symmetrical.  The little blue tape tags are guides I put on from my measurements.  It took multiple tries to get this right, and it was a little nervewracking since the clearcoat has to be applied within a certain time.

The front fender was easier, but it isn't trivial to get the stripe located inthe exact center of a piece of metal that curves in two dimensions. A cardboard template helped a lot.

Shot the black.  

  Stripped off the masking.  Those little light areas at the front of the fender are where the masking tape lifted the paint.  Luckily, I hadn't thrown out the leftover red paint, and it was still (barely) within its pot life, so I touched the spots up with a tiny artist's brush.  That was the only area where that happened.

Then shot the clearcoat. Two medium wet coats 5 minutes apart. Some areas came out very smooth and glossy. Some others had very noticable orange peel. This is probably where experience counts, but since I had planned to rub out the clearcoat anyway, the orange peel wasn't a big problem.

Wet sanded the pieces with 1500 grit.

Rubbed with compound:

Initial polishing. The pieces will get another thorough polishing before installation.