Working with a stripper

It came time to start removing all the old paint from the bicycle and preparing the frame, fenders and chain guard for a fresh coat of paint (or 5)...I used lacquer stripper available at Home Depot for this. It works great, but it will eat your skin, so wear protective gloves, work in a well ventilated area, and have a few old toothbrushes handy for application of the stripper...it will eat those too. The chain gaurd was the first to be cleaned, followed by the frame and the fenders.

Someone decided to brush paint the original white fenders with black paint, while they were still mounted on the bike. This was done very poorly, and meant that every component had globs of paint that required stripping.

The fenders had many little dimples in the sheet metal that have accumulated over the years of use that were much too difficult to hammer out because of the many contours on the fender. Instead, I opted to fill them in with a little auto body filler. The pictures below show the fender after stripping, sanding, priming (with red-oxide primer), spraying with black Tremclad, sanding again, and touching up with auto body filler (white stuff on the fenders in the picture). I sprayed the fenders first with primer, then with black Tremclad prior to sanding. Then, I sanded them and was easily able to see the exact size and shape of the indentations (some are still visible here). This was a very long and tedious process because after filling, I had to spray and sand again to verify the fenders were smooth. The work is definitely worth it because when it is sprayed with gloss black paint, and has a mirror smooth finish, the last thing you want to see is a glaring dent.