The last week or so I've just been touch-up painting the frame and getting down to cleaning up some of the components.
I've been loathe to do touch up painting on my frames until now for several reasons. I didn't feel like the other frames really needed it and I was afraid to screw up the overall look of the frame with mismatched paint splotches. However, the Circuit was in below-average shape (re: the frame already looks beat-up so a few mismatched paint splotches ain't gonna make that big of a difference) and the frame itself doesn't seem to be worth much anyway so I figured I didn't have anything to lose and decided to get my feet wet.
As I've said before, it's painstaking and tedious work. It took me the better part of an hour to mix my first few batches of paint, trying to get the perfect shade of red. Yes, batches, plural. Apparently the 'perfect shade' while wet dries into a not-so-perfect darker shade later. So a lot of trial and error with mixing up a slightly lighter shade and hopefully having it match up later. I am literally watching paint dry. In addition, the Testor's paint I'm using gets really tacky and gummy after maybe 15 minutes and is pretty much unusable after that. 15 minutes is just enough time for, say, one side of the top tube before I have to mix a fresh batch.
I've got most of the frame touched-up now and the results aren't as hideous as I thought. The next thing I have to do is to lightly sand down all the touch up spots so the built-up paint is smooth with the existing paint. For this task, I'm using an LMG Enterprises polishing kit that I originally bought to use for model car finishes. It contains a number of cloths with varying grits, like super-fine sandpaper. After the bumps are smoothed out, I'm gonna hit it with the rubbing compound, polishing compound, and finally the Zymol.
Cranks: Aside from a huge scrape that looks to be from the chain falling off, the cranks are in decent shape. There's some heinous dried grease stains on both sides that absolutely nothing would remove. Nothing, that is, until I tried some rubbing compound. Then I polished and waxed 'em with a generous amount of elbow grease, after which, I felt like my elbow joint was going to lock up permanently. Hit up the front and backsides of the crank bolts with some Nev'r dull to clean off the rust and Simichrome after to shine 'em up. I really dig the laser-etching on the big chainring, and even though everyone's heard knee-pain horror stories about Biopace, I can't wait to go out and hammer on 'em. I think Biopace may have just exacerbated positioning and fit problems that were there to begin with.
Brakes - The 80's were a big time for using white on parts of a bike that were in contact with the grubbiest parts of a human - your butt and your hands. Even though I love the look of a white saddle, white handlebar tape, and white brake hoods, the clean-freak in me is going into convulsions. White brake hoods seem to get grimey just be looking at them. Well, thank goodness for Simple Green. A little spritz on a scotch-brite pad and decades of grime and grit are erased. They'll never be as white as when they were new, but they look a lot better.
I've also disassembled the entire front brake caliper so I can polish all the painted surfaces more easily. These are turning out quite good and aside from a couple chips look almost NOS.
The levers, however, are a different story. Levers seem to be a magnet for scrapes and scratches from falls and innocently leaning the bike somewhere, and these are no different.
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