Cyclofiend: RBW Color & Touch Up Paint

Cyclofiend.com: Rivendell Bicycle Works: Touch Up Colors & Such:
Touch Up Colors & Other Considerations for Rivendell Bicycles

"..You mean, spell bolor with a 'k'?..."

Questions about color matching seem to pop up reasonably frequently. Seeing that first scratch in your beautiful bicycle can be a reasonably traumatic experience, and everyone has to find their own balance between detachment and obsession.

Somewhere in a Reader or Catalog past, Grant said something like "a bicycle with no scratches has no stories to tell", which still ranks in my mind as one of the more insightful things he's written.

Still, when faced with a gouge or deep scratch (particularly when the "story" is one of a bike rack bruise) most folks elect to touch up the finish. Naked steel will corrode (Hey, Hey, My, My...) and if your local conditions include salt air or nasty winter conditions, it's not a bad idea to help protect the finish. Bear in mind that one of the things your eye likes is smoothness, and any change in that smoothness catches your attention. So, the little buildup you might get at the edges of your touch-up may attract your eye just as thoroughly as the scratch. Also, bear in mind that most model-type paints are enamel and most fingernail polishes are laquer. My preference is actually toward the laquer, all things being equal.

I've ranked the colors as to whether they are RBW-Confirmed, Recommended by other owners or a total Wild Guess or Speculation. If you have a suggestion, please pass it along. If you are the type of person who gets frantic about such things, I'd recommend trying it somewhere like the outside clamping area of a dropout, where it's chromatic variance can mock you from inside the darkened confines of the QR Clamp area. Which leads us to...

The Dreaded Disclaimer Paragraph: I've also gotta say that you're on your own on this- if you slap it on and it looks wrong, please don't harangue me. You might also take a second or three to think about whether you are the kind of person who sees the 99% that looks good or the 1% that looks bad. Both are good traits, and depending upon the task at hand, extremely helpful. It won't match exactly - either due to color variance or becuase of the surface transitions. As Hyper-Performance Ray once told me, "Originally, it was perfect. Now, it's just unrestored."

I don't want to dissuade you, but do want to keep you realistic...

Note - if you are looking for information on bottom bracket spindle lengths for Rivendell models, there is a nascent page in the RBW Owners Bunch on Google Groups.