When the shadow arrived I knew I had some work ahead with the petrol tank. No surprise there says you, but aside from having to re coat the thing I had to look at the dodgy looking growth on the left hand side.
And also the dent on the right near the saddle end of things which some twat had stuck a bullet hole sticker on to camoflage or maybe draw even more attention to..
The dent isn’t fixable from the point of view of beating it out as it’s way down in the skinny end of the tank and this is 1980’s steel tank so it’s just much easier to fill it on the outside I think.
The growth is as I suspected a little more complicated. It seems the bike/tank has had a little accident at some point which badly dented and probably holed her lovely form. But that wasn’t the end of the crime. It seems someone unable or unwilling to use a gas welding torch attempted to close the holes in the tank with a brass filler rod and while they left brass about the area much like the preverbial pigeon and it’s preverbial droppings, they failed in fact to seal the tank. And after that someone (one assumes maybe the same someone) then covered it all with fillers. The growth is a result of the uncontained petrol getting in behind the fillers from the inside through the afore mentioned missed holes which then caused the fillers to lift off of the steel and crack the paint. Which years later left me with this….
It’s ugly I know and after a little surgery to check it out and find the hole(s) it ends up looking like this…
There are five seperate holes in the side of this tank. I’m thinking it might be worth covering the whole section with a plate. How I wish I was a welder by trade or even just good at welding, but at least I know what my problem is here and that is that my main petrol tank in it’s current state isn’t going to be any good at holding petrol (or any liquid). I wonder how far I can get on the reserve?
As an aside note, from this excavation I have found that the bike was original the candy red colour and it has seen maybe three other colours since.
