Chinese Carbon Bikes - Paint

     So now you have your perfect bike size figured out and you've placed your order for a bike frame but you want it painted or finished in your own custom design. What do you do?

     All the Chinese carbon frame distributors offer custom finishing options which vary from copying real paint and decal schemes (to make a counterfeit bike), creating custom designs for the customer, using custom designs from the customer, and finishing options like matt or glossy. With the FM098 frame I ordered from DengFu through the Velobuild group buy #7 I have selected a custom two colour design that I will send to them.

     On the group buy ordering page there is a paragraph that explains that to submit a design you must select the colours from Pantone that you would like to use, create a .JPG, and Email it along to the company's representative, Lucky.

     My favourite car is the Ford GT40, and I have always loved the Gulf Oil livery colours of powder blue and orange. I decided that I would have my frame painted in a similar scheme.

     The livery also looks sweet on a Porsche.

     After some searching on the Internet I found a Baum Coretto with a paint design that I liked and after some more searching I actually found one in the Gulf livery colours!

     I applied the Coretto paint scheme to the FM098 by using pencil crayons and submitted my drawing, the above images of the Baum bicycle and an image of the Ford GT40 so they could see the inspiration. I had determined that the proper colours to use would be PMS 290 (for the powder blue) and PMS 165 (for the orange).

     After less than 24 hours Lucky responded with a mock up of my design on a photo of the FM098. She said that they do not have the two colours that I had requested and wanted to know if the alternatives they use were acceptable. Upon looking up PT2975C (blue) and YS7871 (orange) both colours looked alright to me.

     There were two small changes that I wanted made to the DengFu design so I used my weak GIMP skills to edit their image and sent the requested changes along to Lucky.

     The next evening I received a reply with my requested changes and I accepted the modified design by Email.

     The black portions on the frame are a clear coat over UD carbon weave. They will be filled with custom decals that I will have made up. I will be describing the decal ordering process in a future post because I need to have the physical dimensions of the spaces before I can begin designing that portion of the frame.

     Now I wait for the group buy on Velobuild to close and for delivery of my custom painted frame.