Bicycle Mechanics - new paint on frame...who is best?

Hi.
Thanks in advance for your time.

i have a burley duet tandem
(houdini) looking for new paint.
Should i approach a bike shop
to farm it out or approach
a paint shop directly?

later.
mike.

I think that it depends a lot on what you are trying to accomplish.

If it was my bike, I think that my first call would be to Burley to see if they would refinish your frame and what it would cost. While you have them on the phone, you could check on a replacement sticker set.

For a plain, one color repaint job. I'd look for a local powder coater.
For a fancy airbrush job, I'd try a local motorcycle custom painter. Actually, I think that might be what I'd choose to do.

Assuming you feel competent to disassemble and reassemble the bike yourself, I don't see any advantage in getting a local bike shop to act as a middle man. They'll probably want to add on 10% or so for their trouble.

As Retro Grouch said, I would look for powdercoaters in your area. They'll be able to sandblast your frame to bare metal and then shoot it with a nice powdercoat. Shouldn't cost ya a pretty penny either, unlike the custom painter idea. Or you could DIY.

It probably be best to find someone local to paint your tandem. Typically a tandem can't be shipped via UPS or FedEx Ground because of their size, and have to go truck freight.That can run upward of $150.00 or so, each way. You might enquire of your local bike shops who they might recommend for painting bicycles. Bikes are tricky to paint correctly, most auto paint shops couldn't do it right. Places that paint motorcycles would be a choice, because they're used to painting tubes and round objects. The quality of the job is largely dependent on the prep work done.

All that said, the Joe Bell, in La Mesa California, is considered by many the very best bicycle painter in North America.

Joe Bell is great as is Acme in Portland. Cyclart (www.cyclart.com) is considered pretty good too.

Acme is terrific but they don't have a web site - very small operation. You can however, get a glimpse of their work at www.vanillabicycles.com - they do all the paint for these bikes.

55/Rad