Painting over chrome

According to the photo's in the Norton Singles book by Bacon, the last year of the narrow red stripe outside the larger black stripe was 1938 and 1939 and on have the red inside the black.

On my 1946 Model 18, the striping was applied directly to the chrome with self etching primer.

I have put 2300 miles on the machine since it return to the road and the stripes are still in place after numerous cleanings and polishing. The rims were done in a similar fashion and aside from a stray stone chip seem to be holding up fine.

FWIW

Mark Zenor

looks great david

have to say in the past i have had no luck painting chromed parts and the paint has eventually fallen off or was easily chipped, saying that i never had anything other than a regular etch primer to try and stick the paint on.

Hi David

Nortons had a red line outside of the silver/black panel from 1935 to 1938.

Painting chrome tanks can be a bit fraught unless you are familiar with or have access to profesional equipment. The process for painting large panels on chrome goes like this - mask accurately then carefully dry sand with 400 wet & dry. Re-mask just on the edge of your sanded panel & etch prime. repeat with primer - filler if you have any imperfections in the metal finish, and dry sand with 800 W&D.Then the silver panel. Then mask & spray the black wide line. All of the basecoats can be cellulose if required.Then 2 pack clearcoat over the whole panel. 2 Pack lacquer needs the correct breathing equipment. Each one of these paint layers needs a re-masking & moving out a fraction, otherwise you will have a final edge showing undercoat colours.Then your transfers, having a clear lacquer base under them allows for any problems like miss-alignment and having to scrape off the transfer. Classic Transfers stick straight away, and do not have much water'slide'. Scrape off on a silver basecoat and any marks on the silver will be magnified by the clear topcoat.

Transfers need a very light 2 pack dust coat to seal, then clearcotelocally masked to finish. This can then be cut back to blend into the existing lacquer. This is an abreviated version of the process!

The only paint that will really stick to chrome, and for the thin red line, is 2 pack epoxy. It is also fuel proof, polyurethane is not. It works best sprayed on, using 3M vinyl masking tape. Judging when to remove the tape is alsoa difficult one, generally around 12 hours later. Do it all in warm dry weather. Hope this has not put you off. Attached pics of my 1938 CS1 tank. Roger.

Help!

Each picture is around 1.5mb, have tried to upload them individually, but all I get from this site is 'attachment is too large'

Anyone know how to get around this? !!!

Roger

Hello David and Chris,

Thank youfor that information.

Chris, is the proposed increase to file size imminent? If not I will try David's suggestion to-morrow.

Regards,

Roger

easy solution is a picture editor to resize the picture files that straight from the camera are always 1mb+

one free program i have used for years is called infran view.

search for it on www.download.com once installed open a picture with the program and goto edit > resize usualy just resizing to your actual screen size is enough to get most images under 100kb then all you need to do is save a copy of the resized image