Royal Enfield Continental GT650 – TG's Custom Bike Build

This month we’ve been creating fire in the booth. The paint booth, that is. And when I say ‘we’, I mean professional paint wizard and model maker, Pete Wycherley. Ever since we stupidly built a Caterham in the office, TG isn’t trusted with toxic paints and a gun – especially if what’s being painted has to look any good. But if you need any brass rubbing, we’re your people.

Anyway, as you would have seen from previous reports, we’re going for a jazzy paint scheme inspired by Alexander Calder’s BMW 1975 3.0 CSL Le Mans car. Not that Pete thinks that. “When I first saw it, I was getting Lego vibes,” Pete says as he simultaneously cracks open the red, yellow and blue tins of paint as well as a smile. “But when it’s all put together it’s an amazingly impactful and complex colour scheme.”

Now, anyone who has painted anything – from skirting boards to cars – knows that the key to any kind of painting is prep. If the surface is good, painting is painless. So Pete spends a load of time getting the fibreglass panels for the fairings and covers in good shape, making sure there are no pinholes in them and that they’re nice and smooth.

Pete applies a nice high build primer, sands that back, checks for any filler, and then goes back through them with a light kind of primer. The primer is white as it's going onto a white base, so it’ll keep the luminosity of the colours coming through. Then it's two shots of white base coat and then time to mask up.

The livery is masked up to separate the different colours. So everything is painted white (all layers receive two coats of paint, 15 minutes apart, to give us the colour consistency that we need), the colours are masked, then the blue is sprayed. Next, Pete takes that mask off to reveal the red area, spray the red area, then yellow and then you've got your livery.

Demasking looks incredibly satisfying, but you've got to find a sweet spot – you don't want the paint to be too hard/soft. If it's too hard it may lift beyond the masked line. If it's too soft you'll end up with stringy stretches and you won't get a really clear masking line. If there are any faults Pete goes back in and touches them up so everything is seamless.

After a few more layers, it then goes in for clear coats (baking at 65 degrees for an hour) to make it shine. Which, Pete is doing as I type. So next time you (and me) will see the bike it’ll be quite a different thing to the standard red bike with its ice white racing stripe.