It occurs to me that I'm documenting this entire refinishing job under the heading of just a fairing mod....and in a plastics section of the forum. Perhaps I should have moved this to a new thread once I was working on metal parts - but here comes more metal.

These are aluminum pieces from the lower portion of what we call the chin. Sanded with 80 grit to get rid of the textured surface.



And primed with my first use of Tamco DTM. Sprayed nice. I'm starting to feel pretty good about what's coming out of the gun.

And since the learning curve is starting to flatten out and I'm moving quicker, I moved on to the rear fender last evening. I DA sanded this with 220 grit and also hit it with the Tamco DTM primer.

Looking good.....

Wow - great job and it is coming out real nice!

I paint bikes for a living. When sanded through to the basecoat or to the plastic, some will lift as you have seen. If you hammer the primer on too wet, the solvents will crawl and lifting will occur just as you found. You may find a second priming session will lock that edge down. If severe like yours then you have to prep all over again. If a panel has no damage, all you have to do is scuff the original paint, seal and paint. No need for primer and unnecessary sanding. If there is damage, there is no need to prime the entire panel, just prime the damaged area. You have to watch sand throughs on bikes because the products and procedures some of them use suck. No need for epoxy either, a quality 2K primer is fine. Your tenacity is admirable.

Thanks guys for the encouragement and advice.

Scott...I do have a tendency to be pretty heavy handed when it comes to sanding AND spraying. I'm becoming more aware of this as I go, and starting to see where I'm shooting myself in the foot. I'm trying to adjust accordingly. Realizing this with the paint gun has been the biggest step forward for me. But now I'm probably somewhere on the side of dry spray rather than too wet most of the time. Still trying to find the right balance between paint volume, air pressure, speed and distance....but it's getting better.

One of my issues is definitely some confusion about scuffing. If scuffing is taking off every bit of shine, then the OEM paint on these Victory bikes is a real issue for me. There is a large/deep orange peel on the factory finish on all Victory bikes. I never really noticed it until I started this project and had to go up against it. I bet a real painter would laugh at these OEM paint jobs. I just can't seem to get rid of the orange peel without breaking through the base coat, and I really don't want to start with a substrate that is THAT orange peeled. So, I've been opting to just dig in to get a flat surface to start with...even if that means I'm finding bare metal or plastic. Perhaps you have more advice on that topic.

That reaction...the lifting...has only happened on the parts that have a metallic base coat. Some of these parts are black, some are metallic blue, and some are metallic gray OEM paint. The ones with the black base coat, I haven't yet had any issue with lifting no matter how deep I get...which is why I have been assuming it was the metallic. A lesson I thought I learned with the fairing, but am just hard headed enough to ignore when I got to the lower that failed. Actually, the guy that owns the bike sanded one lower and I did the other. The one I sanded is the one that lifted. The one he sanded looks fantastic. Again...heavy handed and I got too deep, I think.

Here's the fun part for today. The owner of the bike came over last night to do some surgery on the fairing - to decide on placement of the new LED turn signals that are going to flush-mount in the fairing. We started talking about the back fender and I asked him why in hell we were removing the turn signals off of the fairing but leaving the ones on the back fender. So...all those red arrows show all of the holes he's fixing to weld shut, and I get to start over on this fender. I should have asked him before I shot primer. I almost did. No biggie. I've got a ton of other stuff to do in the meantime...and I'm enjoying this challenge.

In addition to being heavy-handed, I've also discovered that I'm long-winded and picture happy.

Alright. I haven't actually got my hands on this thing yet, but he sent me this pic.

I'm thinking 80 grit to feather out the remaining paint and primer and then hit the exposed metal with epoxy before I do any filler. Does this sound right, or is the epoxy overkill?

Wondering if the Tamco DTM primer is a good alternative to expoxy...I mean...they call it Direct To Metal. I'll shoot them a message to see what they have to say about that - just out of curiosity.

Some pics from last night's progress. This is two coats of the Tamco DTA primer directly on chrome pieces.

Headlight bezel:

Saddlebag handle...this was directly after the second coat. I was pretty impressed with how this stuff flowed out smooth after spraying. It flowed for a long, long time.

This is the saddlebag hinge. The beer is the only way I have found to force myself to not get impatient with flash times. The flash time on that DTA is "20 to 25 minutes". An eternity for an impatient person like myself.



This primer is very, very thin and I had to cut back spray volume way more than I have with the other stuff I've sprayed. I'm fairly certain I laid down more than I should have on the first pass because of this, but I believe it'll all work out.

Just curious but did you reduce the tamco primer? Looking good btw.

Dreww...no. Tamco specifically says to not reduce the DTA primer. 1:1 with the hardener. Spec says it has an 8 hour pot life.