The International CBX Owners Association

After five months and a fair bit of pestering within the last three, I finally got the call that my parts are ready for pickup from powdercoat. No way I'm getting it done before Mid-Ohio, but maybe for Barber.

Here's hoping that they didn't screw anything up.

Well they screwed up a few things.

All the calipers have powder down in the seal grooves and bores.
The front master wasn’t masked at all.
A couple small pieces have just poor finish quality.
The fork legs have powder in the seal grooves.

The rest of the stuff looks great though.

I wish they weren’t the only option for powdercoat in our area but oh well. The messed up parts will be fixed later this week.

Also, I really need to get the engine cleaned up and painted. What are y'alls thoughts on removing the bolts that hold the case halves together one at a time for cleaning/polishing post-paint? My motor is going to wind up black and seeing painted fasteners that shouldn't be painted just gives me a nervous tick.

I just don't want to disturb the gasket and such. If it's a bad idea I'll just paint them and not look at them.

This is the problem with many powder coaters. You will have problems with the brake parts being badly coated. It'll take you a lot of time getting everything cleaned out. Not to mention dimensionally changed mounting surfaces everywhere. You should specify very carefully what you wanted masked off, and plugged all threaded holes with bolts/washers.

I hope you knocked the bearing races out of the steering head.

One of my pet peeves is the gloss finish on parts that should be satin.

Not a fan of powder, the way most guys do it.

Dave

Your engine is black now - correct? Unless there are large patches of totally missing paint, you would be amazed how well it will clean up with a strong detergent and a lot of time. After it's dry, you can restore the satin shine by spraying down with WD40 or Armor-All. It will likely look far better than spraying over everything. The only way to paint an engine correctly is to totally disassemble it, clean and paint each individual part, have all the fasteners re-plated, then reassemble. It takes a lot of work and time and why the highest-end restorations cost so much.

Dave

I did very carefully specify what was to be masked, they just ignored it.

As for the gloss/satin thing, I’m not doing a concours restoration and I prefer the gloss look myself.