Singualr Hummingbird – Fork respray

so i’ve had quite a few pwoplw on here asking how / who did my fork respay so i thought i’d reply in new thread – just need to get some photos organised as its a bit picture heavy…

i was never quite happy with the look of the bright white rebas on my hummingbird:

they just didint look quite right….
I managed to get hold of a 2nd set of Reba WC’s which were cosmeticaly crap – they were in need of a service and had a large oil? stain down one side:


so first off i stripped tehm right down, wiper seals out etc masked off with masking tape the speal contact surfaces and stuffed the legs with clean rag. Then started on the ‘Reba’ logos with 800grit wet and dry;

Is this the thread?

You could exchange your fork painting tips for patio tidying ones 😉

yeah yeah yeah… wife does the garden – not me…

oh and yes this is ‘the thread’, it’ll just take me a while to get teh full ‘how to’ together…

any way…

so at this point i started to think about decals….

i started off by tracing the singular logo letters i needed (in CAD), the only letter i was missing was a ‘b’ or ‘B’

once i’d got that far, i transfered to photoshop and did this:

which i changed to this:

i’d added in the + and – air preassures for my weight and also the rebound setting i like, as id lost this info on the back of the leg by prepping them for paint.

i just needed to find some where to get them made up… and turned to Zazzle.co.uk as they did car bumper stickers for only £4 – it thought that if they turned out crap, at £4 i couldnt reallyu complain. They turned out quite well in the end – the colours are almost spot on with the real singular logo on the frame.

yeah yeah yeah… wife doesn’t do the garden

FTFY 😉

Forks look great btw….

tell me about it

right now for the spraying – i contacted sam and told him i was aiming to repsray my forks and needed to colour (RAL 60003), then looked on the internet for some paint and settled on these:

they were about £55 all in (1 x primer, 1 x laquer, 2x RAL 6003)

right – no actual spraying shots as they were all done in the (messsy) garden hung off the washing line on an old coat hanger! but here are some indoor drying shots..

Primer

1st coat


after lots more very thin coats (untill i almost ran out of paint) and i added an old school rebond decal ready for lots of laquer

Can you get higher res decals?

have to ay it’s not the sort of thing I’d ever consider but you appear to have (otherwise) made a good job.

i made the decals up at 300dpi – and the printing job isnt to bad either.

final installment…
all laquered up – then a 48hr wait for the laquer to cure….

finally reasembled with new enduro wiper seals


notice i didnt laquer in the decals – i didnt know if they would last that well so didint want them in as a permanent feature – so i can get them reprinted and reapplied in teh future. So far so good though, theres been no fading or damage.
anyway, onto the bike.

you can see in some of teh photos that the colour is not a 100% match – thats because the forks are sprayed and the singular frame (like all singulars) is powdercoated – so they react differently in different light -highlighted in this photo~

however i dont notice the differance any more an neither do the people i ride with, i just think that some photos over high light this, when you see the bike in the flesh, they look much much closer.
sooo, decals on:

final finished pics:

total cost was around the £70 mark and took 2 weeks to do (evenings and a weekend).

TBH i wouldnt have done it if i hadnt got hold of a second pair of forks which were in need of a revamp – however it was a good learning experiance, and would now do it again.

That’s a great job you’ve done there and a quality write up too. Good to see an individual mod, makes it more worth while.

Nice touch matching the typeface. 😀

v. nice..! especially like the fork setting detail on the stickers

was going to do this with my swift, but as it is an orange swift it has a wet coat and is not powder coated.. making finding a match harder sure a auto paint shop could match the colour though..

might do the frame to match my forks! as white is easier to do and did get some new frame decals from Sam @singular

<..swooon..>

That’s a proper good job that, good work. Love the Singulars.

Even when they were ‘crap’ those forks look better than mine 🙂

2 weeks helping in the garden would have made a big difference too!! 😀

Must get around to tidying up the garage 😆

There appears to be a theme here…… 🙂

<rewind>

£55 for the paint/lacquer ? 😯

brilliant write up and thanks for the info I have some reba lowers inreadiness for a frankenfork project.

Any chance you could let me have the sticker info to send to Zazzle?

I would pay you for it 😉

very nice, great job

Very tidy indeed

yep – allthepies

£55 is alot for some paint, but they are colour matched to ral colours @ £9.95 a can and i wanted to used decent primer and laquer to avoid the dredded respray chips, notorious on home spray jobs – its worked so far 4 months later (600+ miles) and no chips.

valleydaddy – just emailed you free of charge (just hope Sam doesnt sue!)

thanks monkeyboyjc really appreciate it 😀

Looks great Monkeyboy and nice write up. I did similar with stripping and re-finishing of a Niner Carbon fork. Followed a very similar process but went up to 2000 grit paper. Also rubbing back with T-cut between coats and to finish it off will give you a really nice high gloss finish.

[/url]
Tai Pegasus[/url] by Singular Cycles[/url], on Flickr

Oh, and I got my RAL matched paint from Autopaint St Helens[/url], seems pretty good so far and wasn’t as much as £55!

Monkey, that’s a lovely finish!

I wasn’t responsible for the forks below – I got them second hand from the owner of Head for the Hills, but Magura used to do custom powdercoating on their forks:

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Untitled[/url] by bent udder[/url], on Flickr

There are much nicer pics of those forks (on one of the proto Hummingbirds) on the Singular print ads.

I do have to say that one of the things that made me plump for a Singular was the paint. Lovely colours.

thanks for the comments guys…

whoops- forgot to put in all of the prep / wet and dry i did between coats….

Nice thread and good work. I’ve just painted my own Reba’s in Plastikote 4003 and no lacquer – I should have used primer but I was being stingy and hardly ever use that fork…

With all the work you put in, couldn’t you have stripped them of their internals and had a powdercoat done for about a tenner?

could have gone down the powercoat road – and prob would have cost about the same as it was a special colour…

but wouldnt have been as much fun.

Plastikote boing:

Total cost of paintjob less than £10 and there’s paint left over. Spent less than 2 hours on it. But I don’t expect it to be very hard wearing!

If done properly, I’ve found plastikote to be very strong actually…

Had a couple of people asking for copies of the decals – alas i lost the original .psd (photoshop) file so i’ve only a 90Kb res version of the file – but if any one else wants a copy for repainting swift forks (or any other singular for that matter) i’m happy to email it to you…

Just reread the original posts – sorry for all the spelling mistakes, but it was a rush job.

EDIT: Scratch that – i just found the original photoshop file!! (so will resend to those that asked for it.