Changing bike colour

So what are your choices if you have a bike but don’t like the frame colour?

Powder Coating

Most bike frames are powder coated from factory, so this is the strongest, highest quality way to repaint a bike frame. You need to find a company that is willing to shot blast and powder coat your bike frame. More than likely they will ask just for the frame so you will have to either remove everything from your bike yourself (obviously you will need to know how to put it all back together), or ask a bike mechanic to do it for you. Some people say shot blasting can damage the aluminium frame and even cause pitting. So ask the powder coating company which method they use.

The results are stunning as seen in my MTB Build:

Airbrush

This requires a compressor, airbrush gun and paint. Unless you already have these items your initial cost is going to be quite high. As with spray-can painting, you might need to find a company to shot blast the paint off or you will need to remove the old paint yourself. Obviously with spray-can painting and powder coating you will need to strip the bike right back to just the frame. I used Nitromors metal paint stripper and a Dremel with a soft metal wire brush. It took quite a few attempts to remove all the paint and lots of effort. I used smaller grit sandpaper to remove all the imperfections in the frame.

I have never airbrushed a frame so I can’t comment specifically but I have seen the results of someone else’s work and it is very impressive. Whether it will hold up to the harder wearing powder coating only time will tell.

Spray-Can

So probably the cheapest method is to get some spray-cans and paint the frame. You can either just spray over the current colour or strip the frame as discussed in the airbrush method above. Primer the frame, paint with spray-cans and then use lacquer. I used Montana Gold 400ml Metal Primer T2400, Montana Gold Paint and Rust-Oleum Crystal Clear Semi-Gloss Lacquer spray to create this bike (using Orange decal stickers).

However I did find the paint chipped very easily, so I found that I needed to touch up the paintwork over time.

Wrapping

Like car wrapping, you can also wrap a bike frame. This has the double benefit of also protecting the frame and original paintwork from scratches. This can be done at home or by a specialist (the only company I could find was Essential GFX in Coleford near the Forest of Dean). 

I had Essential GFX wrap my daughter’s Mondraker Factor 26 bike which was originally silver/black and the results were quite frankly incredible. The team went above and beyond to create a one-off custom bike frame.