HI Guy's
In between projects I am putting together a German KS750 motorcycle, but I have never painted an exposed motor before? Was hoping someone could give me a quick rundown how to paint the motor to get the best results!
For example what do I use for a base coat? Black and then paint it in a metalic!
I am not quite sure where to start, hope someone can help.

Cheers
Lee

Ola Flash

A lot of bikes in the wehrmacht that were Metallic colored were civilian bikes put into action by the Germans. This happened throughout the whole war but after a while they would be repainted to Darkgrey and/or PanzerYellow.
The KS750 was a bike specially made for Military purposes and was therefor painted in the abovementioned colors. The paint on the motorcycles was matt.
Don`t know if you have the 750 with Sidecar or just the single bike but the Frame should be Either grey or Yellow colored and the Engine itself should be silverish.
Check out this pic I found on line

Best to do is paint the block in Silver and then add a Matt Varnish on it to get the shine away. This will bring you a very neat looking Engine

I`m at the moment also working on a Dio with only Motorcyclists. The Officer in the back drives a Zundapp KS750 Which I more or less updated with Brakes, Cables Sparkplug wires etc. etc. The same I have done with the Other Bikes (all BMW, one with sidecar)
You ca view the progress here:
" Woh Geht`s Zum Krieg? "
It gives you a good idea what I have done as extra`s on the kits. Might be usefull when you have the Tamiya Bike as a lot needs to be done to them.

Hope it is of some use to you

Either by brushing on graphite powder (from ground up pencil lead) on a metallic painted base, or by scribbling it on directly with the pencil, on the raised areas, gives a nice steely-metallic sheen. Brushing on the powder gives a softer finish; applying it directly by pencil gives a sharper, newer looking appearance. NB; the pencil lead technique is also very good for simulating those worn areas on painted metal.

Lee,
Rob and Biggles2 have excellent ideas on how to paint the motor.

What scale is your bike? I recently finished a 1/9th ESCI BMW R75 and painted the engine flat black and then painted different shades of gun metal, silver, aluminum on different portions of it. After that I did some metallic drybrushing and a dark wash.





The exhaust system was 'rusted up'



It is not the most sophisticated method to paint an engine, but it works for me. (And the judges at the Dayton IPMS Annual show this past saturday thougth so too--it placed second)





Whatever method you try--good luck and have fun.

Like Keiths BMW, must try one of those, I hear they are pretty tough kits to do well. I've been getting ready practising on Protar on & off! To answer Lees question, it depends on scale. You can get away with flat black drybrushed with dull silver on a small scale model but large kits require a different technique, & Biggles & Fausts methods work fine. I tend to paint the engine dull silver first, sometimes mixing silver & flat black together, then dry brush with a brighter metal colour. Then I go over it with a fine black wash, then highlight again. I might repeat this several times until I'm happy. Actually old-fashioned alloy motors aren't really shiny, they are usually sand cast, so are quite dull, except for deliberately polished cases, for which you do need chrome parts (chrome parts with a matt coat over represents dull stainless steel very well BTW). This is for alloy, note that lots of old bikes have cast iron cylinders, which were painted semi gloss black or stoved. Old British bikes always seem to have oil mist around gasket joints (don't ask how I know!), you can represent this with black or black/brown smears.
One of the most difficult finishes I had to do was on a Moto Guzzi Centauro - it has a semi shiny metallic grey painted engine - hard to make it not look like the paint had worn off!