Change doesn’t come easy, that’s for certain. There’s always a few steps ranging from thought to execution, and most become fixated on the outcome as soon as they *actually* make the decision to change. That change itself can become a nagging fixation, and one of our customers brought in this carbon fiber Felt AR1 for that very reason. A hilariously friendly local racer and quite the powerhouse of a sprinter, he decided to match his new team colors with his frame and he couldn’t get the new color scheme out of his head. So he brought it to us for the swap.
There’s always much difficulty in the process, and that begins with the painstaking procedure of tape-masking-out (protecting areas not to be painted) all of the areas of red to change over to fluoro-yellow. Nick performs this using several widths of tape, a few different types of masking paper and the requirement of an insane amount of patience (read: several hours worth). Oh, and steady hands to lie down a straight strip of tape. Did you know that all masking tape is rated on a scale of 1-100 based on the strength and removability of its adhesive properties? As it turns out, most applications require an adhesive rating of 50, yet household masking tape is produced with even lower adhesive ratings. Furthermore, masking tape is part of a larger category known as pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) which includes but is not limited to: post it notes, blu-tack, stamps, HVAC foil tapes and automotive interior trims.
After the masking application there’s the delicate art of paint mixing to a neon-yellow-green color which is an extremely difficult task in itself… mind-numbingly difficult, really. Then there’s the actual painting which we perform in our brand new filtered clean/paint room. The bike then goes into the oven for a paint curing cycle, after which nick takes a razor and removes all of the tape from the masked areas. Delicately, of course, because we wouldn’t want to strip off a piece of paint that may be slightly attached to the tape. You can see him performing this step in the photo above. We don’t only see red frames and want to paint them black.
This frame has decals on several areas of every tube of the bike with a few of them being incredibly small on the stem, crankset and fork. There’s an incredible amount of detail and precision work that went into this color-swap process, so we’ll continue to let the photos tell the rest of the tale. Needless to say, our customer has never Felt better about his bike. Have any thoughts about making your bike new again? Get in touch with us, we’d love to chat about how we can help.
