It's a bit frustrating to find a bike like this where the paint is in mostly good condition, but has a few problems that would require extensive paint removal to fix. A couple of the pictures above show what I'm talking about. There was also rust on the top and bottom of the top tube. I'm not convinced yet that this bike merits the effort of a serious restoration, but I wanted it to at least look OK from five feet away. As a first step, I tried applying EvapoRust using paper towels wrapped in plastic wrap.


(How do you do that to the bottom of the top tube?)



I scraped a bit with a wire brush, and tried naval jelly on a few spots that didn't seem to repond to my EvapoRust method.

In addition to the rust, there were paint chips and scrapes all over the place. That led to my favorite part of this story -- finding matching touch-up. My technique was this: I asked my youngest daughter if she had any glittery red nail polish. She brought me a bottle, and it matched! Depending on your monitor you may be able to see the color difference here. It's visible under very bright LED or bright sunlight, but you have to be looking for it. In poor lighting, only the texture gives it away.