I'm also interested in doing this- stripping my frame and painting it all black (not worried about keeping branding/decals). I'm wondering if it will be cheaper to DIY if need to buy everything versus taking it somewhere that can get it done.
Few things:
1) Most importantly: it's really hard to paint a bike well. Check the seat tube cluster on the back, and the bottom bracket cluster where the seat tube, chainstays, and shell meet. I've seen a handful of jobs on expensive frames that I would deem "good"; I'm talking modern, high-dollar stuff. With rattle cans, you are going to need a ton of rubbing/finish work in those spots. With an airbrush/spray gun, you need to tweak your solvent ratios to get it to flow nicely. You'll still need touchup, just less.
2) Stripping runs the gamut from easy to hair-pulling-ly hard. Paint is easy, if time consuming: grab a contractor bag, and slather Citristrip on the frame. Leave it over night, scrape, and repeat. Powder coat is
practically impossible for a home DIY to strip. In cases of a powder coated frame, you are best just scuffing the entire surface to prep for paint.
3) Bondo/file/sandpaper dings, scratches, or other damage. Literally anything you can see on the frame (and some stuff you can't) will show up under paint.
4) Masking threads/tubes only goes so far. To do an excellent job, you really need to run taps through threaded parts, and really need to ream out/face mating surfaces. Dropouts get away just fine with cut masking. There are ways to skirt this without the right prep tools, but since you asked...
5) Gloss finish is harder than matte or semi-gloss, by several orders of magnitude.
Paying someone to do it for ~$150 will get you a nicely media-blasted frame, a single color with clearcoat, less-than-perfect paint in the areas mentioned in (1), and little-to-no post-paint prep. ~$500 will get you a tip-top job in one color (ie: no runs/orange peel, all mating surfaces faced, all threaded fittings cleaned). Neither price would typically include decal application. Panels/lining/pinstriping on frames would typically see the price jump into the thousands, depending on the complexity...but what I will say, is that for that price, you won't be getting work back that you wouldn't be 100% satisfied with.
Whether or not the price is worth it, depends on if you are going to enjoy the (long by hand) process, or not.
www.coast2coastpowdercoating.com
