What a Pain in My Tail Section

2008 is off to an inauspicious start.

The tail section for my Ducati arrive about 6 weeks ago. I haven't had much time to deal with it until last week. I decided I'd try to match the reds better this time around. (Every time I look at the mismatched color on the nose it bugs me a little more.) I found a website that would sell me aerosol spray cans of the right color. Not cheap but I figured it was worth a try so I ordered 2 cans of color and 1 can of clear coat. My order arrived Monday.

Even a lab rat learns from experience, right? I decided to spend more time prepping the piece in the hopes of getting a better result. I put about 4 hours into filling, and sanding, and priming, and sanding, and filling, and sanding, and priming. ... Mostly sanding. In the end it looked promising.

I wanted to mimic the OEM piece. I'd try to match the basic stripes but I wasn't going to worry about the lettering. It was going to be a simple but time consuming job:

1. Paint the whole piece white with the cheap paint I already had.
2. Mask off the stripes.
3. Paint the piece red with the expensive paint I just bought.
4. Clear coat everything.

The white went on pretty well.

The masking wasn't too hard although my tape doesn't do curves well and there are some subtle curves.

The red went on beautifully.

I pulled the masking off an hour later and I was pretty excited. The color was as close to the original as you could hope for. The time spent on the prep work had paid off. Things were going to be great.

Unfortunately there were two significant problems: there was a spot where the masking failed and there was some red over spray; and there was another spot where the masking tape pulled up some of the white paint revealing the grey primer. I figured it wouldn't be hard to re mask those spots and respray some white.

So I got some paper and went to town. I wanted to be sure none of the new white got into the red so I made sure to mask everything except the two problem areas. I sprayed the white and an hour later came back figuring I'd pull the masking and spray the clear and I'd be all set.

Unfortunately when I did the masking the red paint was dry but not dry enough. The paper stuck in the paint and ruined absolutely the whole thing. What was a good paint job with two significant flaws had become a piece of garbage. There's no way to salvage it, I'm going to have to remove all of the paint and start all over from primer.

Stupid new year.