Yes - the candy reds are quite awkward to get right. They require a layer of sparkly silver paint, layers of the translucent (candy) red colour and then a waterproof clear lacquer. The clear lacquer changes the appearance of the finished coat quite significantly. You will not be able to guess the colour that you need before you apply the lacquer.
I took a plastic spectacle case and sprayed it - a single 'stroke of spray from left to right' - and let it dry. Repeat until the glasses case was completely covered.
By a single stroke I mean I pressed the nozzle to the left of the glasses gas and kept it down as I wafted it quickly from left to right, only letting go when I had passed the end of the case.
What you get is a fine dusting and it might take 4-6 of these passes to cover completely. It dries quite quickly though.
Then I did the same with one pass of red. Let it dry.
I placed a strip of broad masking tape over the left hand end.
Then repeated a second dusting of the entire glasses case. Let it dry, and placed a second strip of masking tap to the right of the first.
Repeat, gradually masking off additional strips from the left hand end. I stopped at 7 times - but the first few wafts were so obviously wrong that I didn't start masking until the third pass.
In the end, when you take the masking tape off, you have 7-12 strips showing the colour when you have sprayed it with one, two, three, etc coats.
So in my case I had strips that showed the colour after 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 , 9 spray passes. What you should have is a darkening red colour - tending toward purple, which still shows the glint of the silver. There is no point in continuing if the final coat makes the layers so opaque that the silver cannot be seen trhough the red.
None of these colour strips will match the colour of the bike. They will not even be close. Don't be alarmed.
Then take some newspaper and tape down a strip of newspaper to cover the top half of the glasses case. So you can see the bottom half of the 7-12 strips that you have just spray-painted.
Waft these exposed strips with 3 or 4 passes of lacquer. Again just one pass at a time - until you are happy with the finish. (You may wish to mask off a long strip to see if there is any difference between 3 and 4 passes of lacquer). I didn't.
Remove the masking tape so that you can see the unlacquered half strips and the lacquered half of the strips.
Match the lacquered half against your bike. Now you know how many coats you need to apply. The unlacquered colour will look wrong. It will look very wrong. In my case, the colour before the lacquer looked to be purple. But as you spray the real part, with each successive pass of the red you will see it getting closer to the unlacquered strip on your spectacle colour chart. That is a real confidence boost - because you know when you apply the lacquer to that colour it will lighten to the correct colour of the original.
In some lights, you could not tell the difference, in other lights I could tell, but no one else noticed. The shiny nature of the paint tends to reflect light and dark. The right hand mirror is the one that was completely re-painted. (The left of the photo). The left hand mirror (the right of the photo) is the original, but due to different reflected light, that is the one that you might choose as being the re-sprayed one !
The technique of using quick passes to give small dusting of the paint and then letting it dry was the only way that I could make sure that when I painted the mirror itself, I could reproduce the thickness of paint that I had applied to the spectacle case. It also ensures that there is no chance of any paint running.
