Does Custom Paint Add Weight?
In this blog post, you will find out if custom paint adds weight to your bike.
This article has some serious bathroom reading material in the beginning. If you don’t need bathroom reading material, then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to see the results. Ok, now for the bathroom reading material.
Weight is important.
Does custom paint add weight? Let’s just get a good laugh and call out the folks who ask this question repetitively: road cyclists. Why? Well, road bikes are built on a weight-optimized platform. Rarely, do you see a road bike weigh more than other bikes; this is especially true when it comes to the really high end road bikes out there.
Before we go any further, let’s not discount riders who are concerned about the weight of their super light mountain bikes out there. We understand that the weight of your bike is important as well; we are not excluding you from the conversation. We are writing this article and tailoring it to the cyclists who have historically been more concerned about weight over the rest of us. Even though we are calling out the roadies, the same information here can apply to any custom painted bike.
Continuing the discussion. Let’s try to understand this, and begin by asking why weight matters more on a road bike than on a mountain bike? The easy answer is because they are the lightest bikes, and the paint weight has a greater influence on the bike weight. Let’s prove this! For example, the average mountain bike may weigh 30 lbs/13.61 kg. The average road bike may weigh 18 lbs/8.16 kg. Let’s assume that each bike had the equal painted surface area(this probably is not too wild of an assumption). 100 g of paint on a mountain bike would comprise 7.3% of the mountain bike weight, but 100 g of paint on a road bike would comprise 12.2% of the road bike weight. That is a pretty big difference!
We can now understand that paint can have a great effect on the weight of a road bike. Anyone with concerns about the weight of custom paint has good reason. Let’s address our original question: does custom paint add weight?
We did this little experiment with a customer who had a really pimped out Giant TCR Advanced SL. The customer was concerned with the weight of paint. To give him a solid answer, we weighed his frame and fork before and after the custom paint job was performed. We disassembled the bike, precariously balanced the frame on a digital scale, and recorded the frame mass. The following pictures show our results.
Original
This picture shows the frame on the scale with original paint and a mass of 842 g.
Stripped
This picture shows the frame on the scale, stripped 99% of all paint with a mass of 721 g.
Custom Painted
This picture shows the frame on the scale, custom painted a blue color along with 25% paint protection film (PPF) with a mass of 835 g. The PPF was strategically placed to protect the lower down tube, the inner and outer sides of the seat and chain stays, and the back of the seat tube.
We can see that the original paint job had three colors (black, white, silver), and the paint weight was a total of 121 g. The new custom paint job had two colors (blue, white), and the paint weight (including PPF) was a total of 114 g. These results show that the custom paint job was 7 g lighter than the original paint job, and that includes the PPF on the custom paint job. The difference is about the same as the mass of a 3/16 inch high-speed-steel drill bit.
Summary
In conclusion, the custom paint job on this particular bike weighed just a tiny bit less than the original paint job. Is that the same for all bikes? Definitely not. Can we guarantee that we are removing weight? No. One key takeaway from this article is that custom painting your bike does not add significant weight, nor does it remove significant weight. The answer is basically no, custom painting does not really add weight.