Schwinn Homegrown Bass Boat paint

History of the Homegrown Bass Boat paint jobs as told by former Schwinn employee Rich Adams:

I just remember bass boat as "happening".. the first samples kind of blew everyone away. There was a separate group that was tasked with colors and graphics, and this was largely separate from engineering (although we did have our disagreements on names and such). I think that credit for the paint probably goes to either Skip Hess or Gregg Bagni.. in conjunction with Rainbow powderworks (which is now Spectrum).. because application of that heavy metalflake paint was not easy, and the darts were tough to layer in there... so a lot of development on the production side had to be developed to make it commercial ready. But now you have me curious so I'm going to ask some people.

OK.. I got some beta on the origin of the bass boat paint job - This info is from Skip Hess who was the president of the bike group at the time: A late night meeting with Skip Hess, Gregg Bagni, and someone from Carmichael Lynch (Our ad agency at the time) discussing strategy and concepts, and as it turns out, Carmichael Lynch also had a client that made boats. Beer was involved (as this is always the best catalyst for creativity... or stupidity) and they started talking about this side of the business and learned that CM were scheming a new campaign for the boats called something like the 20-20-20 rule... $20,000 truck; $20,000 mobile home; $20,000 bass boat. The bass boat thing gathered momentum in the conversation, and someone suggested the radical idea that we paint bikes in this color... upon arriving back in Boulder, Rainbow Powderworks was pulled into the conversation, and the idea stuck. They worked really hard to establish a production-worthy process of laying this thick and heavily flaked paint down onto the frames. Some of the first ones were hand sanded in between coats to keep a smooth surface, but later ones were clear-coated over the top. The paint was sourced from a company that specialized in low-rider bikes. So in a nutshell, beers and a weird intersection of bass boats and bikes resulted in this iconic color making its way into production on a bike.

To be clear, bass boat blue is blue flake over black with a lot of clear. The bigger the flake the bumpier the surface. When Rainbow did these bikes for Schwinn, they had to do several coats of clear (like 5 ~ 7) wet sanding each coat to get them to the point that they were smooth to the touch (visually too).

You know a lot of the guys/gals internally took advantage of the hookup at Rainbow Powdercraft and devised all sorts of goofy paint schemes based upon the Bass Boat colors, but Green was pretty popular as was the Blue/Silver 1998 XT bike.

1998 Homegrown Bass Boat colors.