Custom and Modified Bikes   Invented in the 1930’s by painting innovator John Morton (who created the finish by adapting aluminium roof coating paint) Commercial Metalflake paints didn’t become widely available until the 1960’s.    The outrageously OTT finish gained huge popularity in the custom car world after featuring on the cover of ‘Hot Rod’ magazine in 1961. Among the current firms bringing metalflake back to the forefront of custom painting is Blue Moon Kustoms of Wisconsin U.S.A.   Geometric patterns, dramatic contrasting colours and super deep effects are Blue Moons trademarks with many of the designs more 1970’s than anything produced actually in the 70’s.   Did you like it or loathe it?  (those of you young enough to remember it the first time round)                                                                                                                                                                              

I love the look of it Kwak Given half a chance I'd use it on all my bikes (blue naturally, couldn't have any other colour, no no no ). If I can find some thats not prohibitively expensive then I'd jump at the chance... The closest thing I could find to match my ideal colour was Ford Azure Blue which is what I use... But a bit of usefull info for others.. I'm in the fortunate of being able to change things at a whim. I can pull all the vinyl decals off my bike do whatever paint work I need to do and then make some more..   You can get a machine called a Robo master that is a vinyl cutter. You just design the artwork / logo's on your pc and send it to the cutter just as you would a printer and it does all the work for you. Costs about £200 but I have used it to do 4 bikes including AJ's so it has saved me loads of cash.. Having said that, and I think its already been on another thread... you can also buy transfer paper (like model aircraft transfers) and print them off on that and use them in the same way... they are good but not as easy to remove as vinyl if the need arises...   as for metaflake... to answer your question.. It gets the big  from me... I like a bit of individualism in a bike Thanks for bringing this up  given me something to think about...                                                                                                                                                                             

  Nearest I got to metalflake effect was when I printed a picture of my Kwak EN (cruiser, long gone) and the ink in my printer was playing up, it came out candy apple greenish red and looked smashing lol, the bike was just bog-standard red.     I'm glad you like the topic Paul.                                                                                                                                                                               

As much as i liked the ott paint jobs such as Celestial (1970's Trans Am) i would never go that way personaly, though i did used to spray bikes and woot not back in the late 70's early 80's in fact i think i still have a tin of flake some where .....  I prefer to use Pearls as they give a much nicer finish and arnt quite so garish. As for having "Deep" paintwork well thats not down to the paint but final top clear coat the Trans Am i mentiond looked like a swimming pool it were that deep ... but the effect was due to there being 30 coats of Laquer on the damn thang with each coat being "cut" back once dry. as for pearls u can see the effect of "Pure" pearl on the ninja i rebuilt the wheels mirrors fairing stay and gpx on the bike was done in a green / purple Flip-Flop Pearl. gpx were designed on a puter and then printed on to plain paper after which i used "low-Tac" masking film (i use this all the time for one off's and model motorbikes which i build) to actually make a stensil to airbrush the wording. I'm about ready to rip my new vzr to bits for a repaint which again i will be useing pearls over a base coat but this time i'm gonna do something completely different .... i just hope my idea pans out as Pearl is soooo bloody expensive......... and on a low note uwould never be able to match the paint again should anything untoward happen to ones pride n joy ..... cept a complete repaint ofc :<( L8rs folks Slip                                                                                                                                                                             

I like the idea of a decal cutter, my VFR decals on the front cost £35 each..... the paint is good my paint on the honda is a metallic flake but probably not as prominant as the type you anre on about....I like it..