Saturday 31st October 2020 - Mercian King of Mercia Tourer - paint chip and scrape touch up.

So to last week which I had a couple of days off work. Weather had changed up here drastically and rain had come and temps had dropped so was juggling things around in the shed and sorting my two winter rides and thought seen as how I had most of the bits to put the Mercian together then maybe that could be my winter tourer, commuter etc. 

Have been procrastinating building this all year, I get enthused and out it comes and then for some reason after a week or so it goes away again, despite me really wanting to ride it. I think having such great rides in my other Mercian and especially being spoiled by the superb Jack Taylor, it is hard to find the enthusiasm to build something to do the job of what is already being done so well. Now that winter is here I can pull the others down for some maintenance and now have a reason. 

 First thing was to find a touch up paint to cover the light blue touch up that had been used previously. I wasn't aiming to make it perfect as the paint on there is far from it but more to make it just not quite as noticeable as it was now. I rubbed the other patches back slightly and while they were bad underneath, I don't think they stood out anywhere near as much untreated as treated. The blue used was a sort of baby blue but a high gloss which made it really stand out. There was lots of it too, from the really big scrape along the right side of the top tube to the scraped and chipped right seat stay. This was along with just general chips. 

 I rode into town on Tuesday on the Big Dummy loaded with the forks to use as a colour match from the Mercian. I went to the local autoparts in Thurso who have a great reputation for matching car paint. One problem! Closed Tuesday!! No problem really as great day for a ride. Wednesday I called in at lunchtime for work and the young guy was really helpful and interested. He found what looked like a perfect match which was a Peugeot Kingfisher blue from about 20 years ago, put it into the machine, computer says no. Turns out that when he entered the code it kept coming back with a blue that was completely different. He then went to our second choice which had a slightly greener hue to it, yes, it would tell us how to mix this one. So I left with a small bottle of this for £10. 

He told me to make sure I really shook the bottle every couple of minutes to keep the colour consistent as due to it being metallic it should really be sprayed, though should be ok on small chips on a bicycle. Anyway I spent Thursday evening cleaning it and then touching the scrapes and chips in. By no means perfect and still noticeable but I think it is such an improvement. So top tube has gone from this: To this This is the blue of old. and now