Caved Tank

Suppose I'll start it off with a caved tank I just did. Hindsight says it would have been easier to cut & flip then reweld the sides...but whatever. This was done by beating the sides in with a ball peen hammer, a hell of a lot of patience and some flat out f'ing luck. I did everything on it (saved for the dish tank & redoing the rear fender, internal struts, etc) last year. I sectioned and chopped the snot out of (and lowered... a lot) the front fender, resprayed it, chopped the rear fender, built the old external struts, etc. last summer. This was the 'change up' for this summer.

Anyway. Start by beating the shit out of it.


Then continue beating the shit out of it. You'll wind up with something closer to this.
Then continue beating the shit out of it. For a hell of a long time. Then do the other side.

Skip forward a shit ton of work, and throw it into epoxy primer to see what you wind up with. Hopefully something along the lines of this. In truth I did resort to using a skim coat of filler. There was no way I was going to take the time to make the dish 100% metal finished out, as this bike gets POUNDED. Rode hard and put away wet is putting it nicely. Anyway.

White epoxy. She wasn't 100% at that point, but at least I could see easier what little spots needed tweaking. And yeah. I propped it up on jackstands, so sue me. It works. I had other stuff (actually IN paint) on my stands.

Skipping forward, I finally put the thing into black base coat. HD's vivid black.. tweaked. Then I set about doing the silver leaf inlay in the dish on either side. I hadn't done leaf in a *long* ass time so I had to relearn. Obviously still all smeared from my grubby paws, the leafing process and such..but.



Then I masked the inlay. Threw about 9 coats of candy brandywine over it, unmasked and cleared the whole thing. With a hell of a lot of clear to kill the edge. Excuse the crap photos. Most were shot with a cell as I've become too lazy to drag around my DSLR.

Anyway. That lead to. I redid the rear fender at the same time as well. Right off the gun. Also fabricated a set of internal struts for it, among other tweaks. Came out pretty slick overall and really changed the look of the bike. I'll have to take some finished shots with the DSLR...one o these days.