Thought I'd post some pictures of this, it came out pretty well and I am proud of it!
I purchased my z500 new from a local dealership at a good price since the plastic was sun-faded really bad. They even tried heating it up a little to bring the color back, which didn't work at all. After owning it a year, I decided to purchase a quart of single-stage acrylic urethane auto paint and a spray gun and hope for the best.
Taking the hood off was easily the most difficult thing I had to do, having to take the roll cage off and disconnect the instrument panel seems like a poor design, but all in all, it still only took around 3 hours to remove all the red plastic.
Once everything was off, I removed decals and wetsanded everything with 400g paper. cleaned everything with a mild soapy water, rinsed it thoroughly then used a tack cloth right before using rattle-can self-etching primer that I had laying around from another project. A few days later, the acrylic urethane was delivered and wetsanded the primer very lightly again, going through all the prep work a second time. Mixed this particular paint at 4:1 and added ~10% reducer. Sprayed everything, ended up dropping the rear drivers side fairing, so I had to mix paint again a couple days later and fix that.
All in all, its severely orange-peeled, as I had never tried this before. I actually like it though, since it gives the paint a little bit of a textured look. The new color is called Viper Blue Pearl. If you already own a spray gun, the project will cost you around $100 bucks. Not bad, since the dealer knocked 1600 off the sticker because of the plastics.
