Refinishing the Peugeot

I knew when I bought the Peugeot it had some rust. I underestimated the extent of it. I should know better. I've made this mistake before. I'll probably make it again.

Nevertheless, as I cleaned and scrubbed the bike I was clearly losing more and more of the original metallic blue paint until eventually I was clearly going to have to spray some paint.

I hoped to do a partial respray, but matching the light blue metallic proved difficult. Hobby stores couldn't help, and eventually I turned to pricey automotive paint. A local auto paint supply store custom mixed it for me, taking a color analysis of the fork I took in. Auto paint is high quality stuff, but the paint cost me three times what I paid for the bike. And they warned me it still might not be an exact match. It's tough color matching metallics. Any number of factors will throw it off, including temperature, humidity, and my own paint technique.

But let's see. I dutifully taped off all the stickers and pinstriping, hoping to keep them and otherwise prepped the frame for spot painting.

And..... it didn't work. No matter how I buffed and color sanded, there was a clear difference between the new and old paint and it was not going to feather in smoothly.

Sigh.

I was going to have to do a full respray. Which meant replacing all the graphics. I was convinced I'd never find the correct stickers and would have to bodge something together to make the Peugeot together.

So I was pretty amazed to find the absolutely correct set of decals for this obscure Peugeot. While I had to wait for them to come all the way from the UK, they were beautifully done, and I can happily recommend bicyclestickers.co.uk for any sticker needs.

Before I sprayed (again) I sanded everything back even more than I did the first time, and carefully measured the position of the existing decals, with lots of pictures.

I really wanted to put it back together looking as close to original as possible, and once I had sanded and painted I wouldn't be able to see where they went. So I'd better get it right before I went any further.

Once prepped, it went out again for priming and painting. After letting the paint dry and harden a few days, I polished it up with Turtle Wax polishing compound to bring out the shine.

And that worked. The original rust damage was invisible, and you could never tell the paint is a slightly different shade than the original. While I'm no professional painter, I'm very happy with how it came out.

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See all the 1982 Peugeot PH19 mixte posts.

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