If any of you are curious as to whether you can paint a carbon fork non-destructively (ie not flat back the original finish, and later revert to its original appearance), the answer is yes.
A little over 6 years ago I painted this bike
using Krylon Italian Olive Satin spray paint and a flat clearcoat on the steel Frame.
My requirement was that I wanted a colour-matched fork, but didn't want to risk not being able to change the paint scheme in the future.
Painting the carbon Fork was something of an experiment - I wanted to try a non-destructive paint job, so I decided to use Plasti-Dip, which (for those unfamiliar) is technically a liquid rubber coating that can be applied with aerosols like paint. It is definitely NOT paint. It can be peeled straight off if you don't like it, leaving nothing behind.
At the time I used it, aerosol Plasti-Dip was available only in basic colours - white, black, clear and a few 'camo' and 'flouro' colours popular with hunters and the tactical crowd.
- Prep was merely a wipe-down with a spirit rag or tack-cloth.
- Three good coats of White Plasti-Dip were to act as my 'primer'.
- I then went ahead and sprayed the colour coat on, which was the exact same paint as the frame (Krylon Italian Olive Satin).
At this point, if I were to leave it at that, the internet (folks on car forums) told me that the paint would harden like a shell, and peeling it off at a later date would be far more difficult - it would chip and flake off in tiny bits and take forever.
Then I found a thread where some bright spark had the idea of creating a 'Plast-Dip sandwich' by using White PD as base, then paint, then using Clear PD (which is flat) as the 'clearcoat'.
This means that the paint would be trapped between two highly flexible PD layers, and removal should (theoretically) be quite easy.
I didn't test this theory, I just went ahead and did it. I didn't plan on removing it any time soon, but hoped there would be a pristine Easton CF fork beneath all those layers.
Five years later, I stripped the plasti-dip/paint/plasti-dip sandwich off the fork. The experiment worked, the fork underneath looked practically brand new after lord knows how many commute miles in all weathers.
Removal was fairly easy - it didn't peel off in one dream-like skin, but it didn't take more than 20 minutes or require any sharp tools.
This method doesn't produce the glossy, smooth aesthetic you might associate with most custom-painted road frames, but it definitely suits matte-finish bikes or carbon forks paired with bare Ti frames.