Road to Revival: Preparing the Frame

If you've been following the series, you'll know that we stripped the bike down completely. At this point, there are a few things to figure out. How are you going to re-finish the frame as well as any components which could do with some attention? How are you going to prepare the motorcycle frame for painting?

If you have money to throw at the problem, there are a lot of folk who will sandblast and powder coat a frame for you. We enquired with a few local companies, and the cost for a frame like ours worked out at around £300. That's not an unreasonable amount of money for a CB750 or R75 build. But when your donor bike cost £4.50 and a pot noodle, it's more than the bike is worth! As well as this, getting someone else to do the work wouldn't supply us with answers to the repeated questions we see on forums and groups regarding POR15, Nitromors and DIY paint jobs. Is it really possible to get a half decent finish with a brush and a tin of POR15? Does Nitromors actually work anymore? Let's find out!

Preparing the frame

There are a lot of options available for stripping the paint off a frame - do you use paint stripper? A wire wheel? A rust wheel? A sandblaster? The latter is a good option - if you have the setup... First up for testing - Nitromors

Nitromors

This is a controversial one - plenty of folk say it used to be the way to go back in the day, but the modern formula is pretty ineffective. Well is it? The short answer is yes, it does very little. Despite being slathered on and left for several hours or overnight, the Nitromors only seemed to work on parts of the frame where the paint was peeling off anyway. So not a great start for chemical strippers. Being under the constraints of time, we moved swiftly on to try sandblasting! If you have any suggestions for good chemical strippers, leave them in the comments below!

Positives: less setup/equipment needed than blasting

Negatives: messy, ineffective

Sandblasting

We were fortunate enough to have a colleague with a sandblaster and access to an air line at work, so we figured we'd give it a go! Ideally, you'd want a dedicated booth for blasting, as the media gets everywhere! We managed to jerry rig an enclosure with an old dispatch cage and an unused gazebo tarp, and dangled the frame from a piece of scaffolding pipe. This setup just about captured 50% of the aluminium oxide we were shooting. This is one of the more course types of media for blasting, and when the gun wasn't clogging, it worked reasonably well! Copious amounts of PPE is recommended, as the medium gets into every cranny you can imagine - like coming home from a day at the beach!

Sandblasting gives the perfect surface for painting - more on that later!

We masked up the areas we didn't want to blast - like the inner race of the headstock and the VIN frame plate.

After a few afternoons of blasting in our makeshift booth, we were 90% of the way to a stripped frame! Close enough.

Positives: gives the best surface for painting, it's an enjoyable process

Negatives: needs a setup, space and investment in equipment

Rust Wheel

I brought this in on the off chance it might be helpful for removing paint and rust - it worked very well! Other than being difficult to access small spaces, it did a good job of removing the old frame paint pretty quickly. I'd almost suggest using a similar wheel with a Dremel to access the nooks as a good alternative to sand blasting. Wire wheels would probably work well too, but I reckon they might scratch up the frame more than a rust wheel.

Seat hoop prior to getting the wheel out:

Seat hoop after a wheeling:

Positives: removed paint rapidly, little outlay

Negatives: difficult to reach all areas of the frame, noisy! (use ear defenders), can kick if you happen to catch a frame lug with it!

What Did We Learn?

So we tried chemical stripping, sandblasting and a rust wheel. In my opinion, the best option for the DIY frame stripper would be the rust wheel. It creates the least amount of mess, and requires only a few cheap parts. Luckily, as we are painting the frame with POR15, this can be applied directly to rust, or a sandblasted surface. Perfect for the Trackstar!

Keep an eye out for the next entry in the series, where we tackle painting the frame, swingarm and a few other bits and pieces! Don't forget to check out the other entries in this series on our Road to Revival.