Painting Bike parts

[Burque73]

I took measurements on the side covers, but not enough and didn't do a great job with them. The tail section was not hard to figure out. I found an NOS tank, so I took dozens of measurements from the bottom of the tank and Suzuki emblems to the edges of the decal. Then measured the distance from the decal backing to the decal edges and used masking tape to butt up against the edges of the backing with pencil markings on both to line it up.
A lot of prep to plan it out.

If you dont have a reference piece to measure, try to find a photo of the bike and do your best. I did that with my fender and just did my best to center it. Came out pretty good.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube that will help.

That seems pretty straightforward, but very tedious.The decal on your tank in particular looks perfect to me.

I really like the decal in my '83 850G, as opposed to the '82 GK so I may mix it up a bit. Thankfully, I am able to use these tanks as examples. I think they're the same exact tank other than color scheme too.

Thanks for posting this stuff. I'll get to my project soon, but in the mean time keep poking around the interwebs for other useful tidbits as well.

Cheers!

[oldGSfan]

I

That seems pretty straightforward, but very tedious.The decal on your tank in particular looks perfect to me.

I really like the decal in my '83 850G, as opposed to the '82 GK so I may mix it up a bit. Thankfully, I am able to use these tanks as examples. I think they're the same exact tank other than color scheme too.

Thanks for posting this stuff. I'll get to my project soon, but in the mean time keep poking around the interwebs for other useful tidbits as well.

Cheers!

If you have examples, you're good. It's tedious, yes, but even a monkey like me has been fine - at least with alignment. Using an '82 that was handy, I looked for a reference point for my '83's and used a large micrometer caliper to measure in a repeatable fashion, then put painter's tape down, focusing on the letters alignment to the top of the part. You can mark with a pencil on the tape for the next piece of tape at a 90-degree angle to the first one, etc, then build out with tape to create a 3-sided box. Then I laid the decal down from one side, starting at the closed end. I left a 1/16" extra space all around (eyeballed), then centered the decal in there. This is for smaller and simpler stuff, though. All my decals came out great for positioning, but somehow the 'S' in my first tank decal attempt was bad, and I blew it. I cleaned and prepped as well as I could, but got bubbles that I couldn't resolve on the tank's 'S', so now I need to pay $$$ for another set. Jeez. By measurement after the fact, mine are spot on for the side and tail cover emblems.