Re: Rack & Fenders: Bikefanclub.com

For The Insightdriver,

I am glad to hear you are going with a straight cabernet red, because the fade is awful when needs to be touch up. Metallics are hard to touch-up, and when it's a fade, it's impossible to touch up. I brought my cabernet red fade Tetra Pro in Feb. 2004. My LBS had suggested I order the bike nude, and allow him to have it paint by a local custom bike painter. I did not take his suggestion, instead I went with Calfee. When it came in, it had a flaw (about 1/4" crater) in the paint right on top of the top tube. Calfee said they would repaint it, and they agreed to do it at the end of the season.

So, last Nov. I sent my bike back to Calfee for it to be repainted. The paint had chipped in 11 other places by now. When I got my bike four weeks later, it has one of the worse touch up jobs I have ever seen on a bike. Calfee changed their mind without a reason about honoring to repainting my bike, and would do whatever they could with only the touch-up, unless I wanted to pay $450 to have it stripped and repainted. So my LBS say no matter what Calfee will or will not do, that he would honor what he told me, therefore he would pay to have my bike repainted. I accepted his gracious offer, and changed the color my bike to a solid bright Ferrari Red and changed to the local custom bike painter. The local painter stripped it down to the carbon, and filled in all the imperfections, sanded, prepped, and finished it with glassiest red paint I've ever seen.

One of my riding partners brought a Calfee Ferrari Red Luna in May, and when our two bikes are next to each you would believe the difference in the paint. It's like looking at the paint on a Ferrari compare to a Fire Truck. Both are shinny, but the quality of the look is so much higher on one than the other. My LBS sells about 90 Calfees a year, so he sees about two new Calfee frames every week go through his shop. I should have taken his suggestion in the first place. It would have saved me some frustration, and three months of riding a couple of loaners from my LBS. However, the best thing is after riding my bike a whole season with this new paint job, it has only one chip. That's a huge improvement in durability of the paint.

I learned a good lesson here, and that's to take the advice of someone who works a lot with the product your considering purchasing. If I were buying my second Tetra I would be checking with LBS on the quality of paint he is currently seeing from Calfee, and depending on what I heard I would not hesitate on having another party that specializes in painting bikes do the paint on my dream machine. So you may want to consider thinking about if you should leave the bike building to the bike builder and the painting to the painter.

Enjoy your second chance.

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