It’s amazing how paint can make something quite pedestrian into something quite special.
What started out as a standard carbon Malvern Star Oppy C5 has morphed into a sleek, stealthy crit bike sporting 4 different colours, 2 different gloss finishes, and a name that honours the brains behind the frame design – a design that not only won a National Road Series but an Australian Design award as well.
The first job in this transformation was to knock the gloss off the paint and lay down the first of 4 colours – a nice metallic champagne gold along the top tube, and down the outside of the rear stays and the fork
Some 3mm fineline tape was then run around the headtube, top tube and down the outside of the stays to the rear dropouts before the second colour went down – a solid black on the top of the top tube and stays.
A little more masking before the 3rd colour went down – classic Ford Metallic Gunmetal grey on the lower half of the down tube chain stays and the rest of the fork
…before being unmasked and cleared in high gloss polyurethane 2K clear.
Then it was onto the final lot of masking and the decals – or in this instance vinyl stencils
It was then time for the final colour – Ford Ego metallic which contains a very small fine holographic flake, reflecting the full colour spectrum in the sun light. Of more interest however was the change in gloss level to a satin finish in order to make the other colours and gloss under the decals jump out at you.
Unmask to reveal if you got enerything right…
….aaaaaand bingo!
The stem also got the gloss black treatment with the slightest hit of champagne metallic
From there the bike was built up with a strong emphasis on “Lightweight!”. Carbon bars, DA 7800 and 7900 components, Zipp 404 Tubulars (with stealthy black stickers) USE seatpost and Sella Italia SLR saddle. The bars also got a splash of champagne gold, tied in nicely by some custom double yellow stitch bartape.
All up it tips the scales at just under 7kg…and has a few first place finishes under its belt!
Velopaint 
Beautiful work. Where did you get the custom double yellow stitch bartape?
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Hi Dave
The bartape is standard Fizik tape which I sewed some yellow thread into using a heavy duty sewing machine. To replicate you could do the same by taking some tape to an auto upholstery business – a very quick and easy job and the thread comes in many colours. This only works with real leather or leather look tape. It doesn’t work on foam or cork style tape.
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