My younger son was gifted a hand-me-down very old tricycle. It was a Radio Flyer in its former days, very similar to this model. Over the years, it was faded from the sun from red to pink, and at some point someone tried to give it a makeover by spray painting the whole thing black. That paint eventually chipped and weathered and left the tricycle looking like this.
I had recently found a can of stainless steel spray paint (here is the link but please don’t buy it at that outrageous price!) that was lying around in a shed and so I had the idea to test it out and repaint the tricycle.
The first step was to tape off the parts I didn’t want to paint using my endless supply of Walmart bags. I decided to paint the frame and handlebars in the stainless steel, even though some of the parts were actually plastic.
The pedals got stainless steel’d too, though I think this will wear off pretty quickly and I’ll have to touch up with another color of paint. The stainless steel paint didn’t stick super well to the plastic parts of the bike despite my pre-sanding efforts.
The plastic seat got a nice coat of bright red.
The ends of the handlebars got covered in red, too, but the paint reacted weirdly to being sprayed on the metal. It beaded up and refused to coat evenly. I did probably four or five coats and eventually it did cover completely but it still looks all weird and mottled.
The wheels I painted black. I didn’t have any regular black spray paint, and didn’t want to buy any because up until this point this project was completely free, so I used a can of black appliance cover paint that I found. Unfortunately it turned out to have a flat finish, so I sprayed some polyurethane over it after it dried.
Are you ready for the big reveal?!
Somebody is awfully happy about his new bike! Nevermind the fact that he can’t even ride it and can barely even push it around… he’s pretty excited to have a bike (sort of) like big brother’s.
The three-year-old automatically assumes that any time I have my camera out, it must be because I was wanting to take pictures of him…
To recap, here is a nice before shot…
…and after! It took me about two hours to do this but would have been much faster if I wasn’t also chasing two little boys around trying to keep them out of the wet paint… and the road… and the ant hills. But where’s the adventure in a straightforward painting makeover?
