Save the decals
 

Hey guys,

I found an old and abandoned road bike and thought i might try to save it. As you can see from the picture it's an old BCAmerica frame.
I did some searching and was told that this particular brand was a U.S. bicycle brand in the 80's who went bankrupt. The only thing I found on the internet was a patent and an old article about a soccer dad named Wilie Ehrlich who owned the company.
Has anyone ever heard of them or maybe better yet have one ?

Anyway, I'm a nut for things that no longer exist. If this company went bankrupt then I want to preserve that legacy. It's kind of like me having an Enron coffee mug.
Now I would like to repaint the frame. Same color as the original, but shinier. The problem are the decals. Since they were abandoned for who knows how long, they have become brittle and and flaky. I tried soaking them in a degreaser and using a razor blade to peel it little by little with no luck. I need to remove them before I paint, but I want to have the same decals. Can most decal companies reproduce them just by a picture ?
I don't know what it is. They just look so cool and cartoonish. Reminds me of a Captain America color scheme.


http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b2...o/DSC01286.jpg

mswantak (Mike Swantak) can probably fix you up.
I'm having him do a set of decals for my old Trek.

http://www.velographicdecals.com/

There are a lot of place to get decals made. The question is, how much do you want to spend? Since this is somewhat of an obscure brand, nobody probably has the artwork on file. Recreating that artwork will be your biggest cost. If you have no experience with the vector software to recreate the artwork, I wouldn't try, the software can be pricey and there is a learning curve. The best thing is to get some tracing paper and trace the artwork so the decal maker can recreate it to the exact size. Take many pictures and print them out. Make sure the color on the printout is very close to the decal color so the decal maker can match the colors. If you can, send whatever decal fragments you have for color matching.

Good advice from iab. Personally, I don't charge extra for creating new artwork except on one-off custom jobs. The vector art goes into my library for future reuse, so it doesn't seem kosher to charge for creating it.

Let the original decals and paint be.

The original paint will shine up fine with an application of Meguiars Scratch-X with a semi-rough cloth. Buff off with smooth cloth. Seal with carnuba wax.

-Kurt

Hey! Quit driving off business! :mad:

Seriously, that's good advice for waterslide decals, but if they're older vinyls the edges have likely started curling up and the glue underneath accumulating grime. About all you can do with those is trim the curled edges off with a razor knife.

the paint dosent look too bad as is. the scrapes and scratches are like history markers

Well then, I can see where the OP would want to strip the decals off then, but that's still no excuse to strip the paint, which can be easily shined up with Meguiars Scratch-X. Repop decals could then be applied if the OP wishes.

No sense in repainting a frame that shouldn't be repainted.

-Kurt