Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Velomobile Paint Job Is Completed!

I can finally lay my paint brush down and step back and admire my handy work once again as the velomobile body painting is finally done! Yay!  I finished up the last of the pin striping this morning so this is how it all turned out.


The body now has four coats of paint and I am very pleased that it turned out as well as it has.  There was very little touch up that needed to be done on the body after removing the covering that was over the large white stripe so that was a relief in this portion of the build. 




 The simplest thing I had to do with the paint job was to lay down the 1/4 inch white stripes that you see here.  I used the large stripe on the side of the body as a guide and then put down several pieces of one inch wide painters tape as spacers for the next stripe.  This worked out very well to keep everything lined up properly.  One I had laid one new stripe down it was just a matter of moving the blue tape down to the new position to create the next guide for the following stripe and so forth.  


The large decal in the middle of the body I had made for me by a company not far from my home that does full graphics for vehicles. They made up a couple of different sized decals and this one fit the bill.  It was a simple matter of placing the decal as close to center as I could get and then using a plastic squeegee to make sure everything was nice and flat and smooth.  Simple and the look is  great for the velomobile. Also the decal leaves no doubt as to what you are seeing going down the road.  Radius for the curved shape and T-T short for TerraTrike that is the recumbent that is inside the velomobile when completed.


I placed my temporary windshield into the hood of the velomobile in this shot to show you what it will look like when it is ready for the road.  The black pin stripe really sets off the two colors on the velomobile and gives it a nice finished look.  Now on to the electrical hook-ups for the signal, running, and brake lights.  Hopefully I will have it all together shortly and I can get some video of it cruising down the road.  Enjoy the photos and have a good day in your workshop.

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