Saturday, July 16, 2011

Oh, there's no place like chrome for the hollandaise...

It’s a bit of a lazy day, and who doesn’t occasionally need one of those? I watched the Tour de France coverage this morning and then went on a relaxed ride with Sue (she would argue it was only relaxing for me). I didn’t have time to finish my next round of masking and painting, so I spent some time researching for my “chroming” the lugs process.
To give you an idea of what I’m looking for, here are a couple pictures of the chrome lugwork around the headset of the Rabobank cycling team bike, though I've never been a big fan of the orange and blue combo. The other picture is from a vintage Garlatti, which looks pretty spectacular, but I’m glad my Mirage doesn’t have lugs that extreme – can you imagine how long it would take to mask those?

From everything I’ve read, no rattle-can spray paint will give you that mirror-like chrome finish, but I didn’t want to spend the money on chrome-plating the frame or buy an $80 can of automotive specialty paint and another $100 or so for the airbrush equipment to apply it!
I did learn that a base of gloss black will greatly improve the look of some metallic paints, so I’m going to test out the results before I proceed. From videos I’ve seen online, it looks like the Dupli-Color Chrome best replicates the reflective surface, so I’ll start there.

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