THE FINISHING FLOURISH
Once the mechanical rebuild has bankrupted your children’s college fund, you’re almost over the finishing line, surely? Not with that scabby petrol tank and mismatched sidepanels, you’re not. Morgan Rue sprays away…
Once the mechanical rebuild has bankrupted your children’s college fund, you’re almost over the finishing line, surely? Not with that scabby petrol tank and mismatched sidepanels, you’re not. Morgan Rue sprays away…
If you prefer a ratty-looking but mechanically sound bike as a hack, look away now. If ‘heavily patinated’ ticks your personal boxes, fine. And I would never willingly paint over a genuine factory-original finish, however faded… but most rebuild candidates sport a tank which has ‘seen action’, not all of it good. This is what I do to drag ’em back from the brink.
Metal tanks acquire dents almost magically, and it is beyond the scope of this article to explain how to hurl Isopon into depressions as a precursor to the repaint. Best to take it to a professional body person, who may need to cut the tank open to fix it properly. There’s more to it than just filling the dent; note that the morphology of a dent usually involves a raised edge around the crater and filling without prior shrinking of the dent will end badly…
Assuming your tank is dent-free, this is how to get a nice job for around a hundred quaint British pounds. First, do all your repairs. Leaks must be addressed with a suitable sealer (I always use Caswell’s epoxy product as it’s ethanol-safe), or by hardsoldering the pinholes. Often it will work out cheaper to source a better tank. India appears to be making some acceptable replicas, it seems. Oil tanks fare rather better due to the preservative effect of what’s in (and often) outside them.
Clean your parts inside and out with your favourite degreaser and leave to dry, if only to get the fuel vapours down, especially if working indoors.
The tank in the pictures is from my BSA B44, and is fibreglass, so dents are not an issue, but ethanol damage is. Fibreglass tanks which have held E5 fuel would be
better changed for metal ones. Mine has a provenance which excludes E5 from ever having been used in its past. My tank was in factory paint but was so badly faded, scratched and (oddly) bumpy that I was happy to recoat it.
T’internet can supply wet and dry paper in mixed grades, as can your local car parts shop. I start with around
240 or 320 grit paper and, if it’s a new sheet, rub it on something else first, to take any sharp pips off the paper.
It should be folded in three, as shown, so you can re-fold to access the unused part, and it won’t slip. Fingers should be perpendicular to the direction of rub, not parallel, to avoid putting troughs in the paint. Use warm water, with a dash of soap in, and rinse the paper often. The water will take on the colour of your tank very quickly. I switch to 400 grit fairly soon once I see the finish flatting off nicely, and I don’t always completely strip to bare metal. If I get down to factory primer, I’m happy to stop. But if the majority of the metal is exposed, I’d keep going. A bare metal tank needs a coat of etching primer which is available in aerosol cans and this coat doesn’t need to be heavy – it’s for adhesion only.
For the 441 tank, it took a lot of work to get the finish smooth, due to bumps in the gel coat which don’t speak well of Armoury Road’s quality control back in the day. I began the process of frog-to-prince with 240 and 320 grit used dry. Once flatted, I left the tank somewhere warm and dry and switched to the oil tank and battery cover. The latter was damaged and very blue. The damage was addressed with fibreglass resin painted onto the back and flexible filler on the front. This needs to be sanded back with coarse paper, shaped, and smoothed to blend in. Once it’s close to right, minor imperfections can be covered with a layer of spray putty, which is essentially very thick primer. I only spray this onto the
repair areas, as the majority of the panel is usually OK with standard primer. Give the putty plenty of time to dry before wetsanding.
I bought my paint from RS Bike Paint, who supply cans matched to BSA factory colours by name, so you don’t need to know the RAL code. I ordered one can of cream for the tank’s top and knee panels, and two of Peony Red for the rest of the tank and both sidepanels. I also bought a can of clear lacquer. This little lot cost me around £85, which is not too bad. I had previously sourced the tank transfers from the VMCC who hold a massive library of transfers from all decades.
A day later, I retreated to my shed to apply primer. I made wooden supports for the parts to have them at the right height, as I find hanging parts on wires gives me a bad angle, and raises my blood pressure as they might fall. I stapled a polythene sheet to the shed ceiling (on the inside!) to limit dust, lit the stove, and warmed it up to at least 20 degrees. Once the fire was out I put on a mask and sprayed the primer, using several coats about one minute apart. Errors here are not fatal. Then I left it for a day.
Patience is the key and as a younger man I would have been touching it after about an hour, ready to re-flat the primer. Don’t. The next day I took the tank out and began flatting the now-hard primer with 600 grit used wet. Inevitably you will break through the primer due to unforeseen high spots. Press on. Wash
down with cool water (the tank not you) and leave to dry. Re-prime, and here’s a tip. Get your primer in two colours (red, grey and white seem common) and for the second prime, use another colour. When you flat again, you’ll know if you’re going close to the wire as the first primer will show through.
Leave the flatted primer job to dry and harden, as it’s time to think about the masking order. I went for the Cream first, so the knee pad area and the tank centre were sprayed in warm conditions, using a most of the can in well-spaced coats, leaving at least two minutes between for the solvent to flash off. No masking is needed.
When hard, the Cream paint was flatted with 2000 grit (see later for why), dried, and the process of masking was tackled. You can buy very thin masking tape at the width of pin-striping, and this is the only way to make decent curves – using normal wide masking tape just won’t do the radii, especially the outside curves.
Once happy with the lines, full-size masking tape can be overlain, and then paper masking added to cover the rest of the tank. I try to avoid newspaper as once it’s paint-sodden, there’s a risk of bleedthrough. Specialist bodyshop suppliers have rolls of paper, but brown paper will work well.
At this point I use my airline to blow out any dust trapped under the folds of masking paper, as it’s certain to make an appearance as the gloss paint is going on. Fact.
Back to the shed, and onto the wooden dolly with the tank, as it’s time for the
Peony Red.
Once paint, shed and tank are warm, I sprayed one can onto the tank, and the other onto the oil tank and battery cover. Start with many dryish light coats, not worrying about the gloss, but aiming for a good build-up of paint without runs. Then comes the skillful part, as the final coats need to keep a ‘wet edge’ moving across the job. Good lighting is crucial to seeing the wet paint-edge which ensures that each pass overlaps the previous one. If you move too fast, there’ll be a dry edge between two passes and you’ll have ‘tiger stripes’ in the finished job – which is not irretrievable, as we’ll see.
I remove the masking after about 30 minutes, before the paint hardens and the tape can damage the masking line. Then I wait. Days are better than hours, at this stage…
I’d ordered a can of clear lacquer, the plan being to flat the finished paint job, apply the transfers, and bury the lot under clear lacquer. However, the transfers available from the VMCC were not waterslide like Airfix model decals, but vinyl, and came with dire warnings NOT to lacquer over them at any cost. This is a shortcoming of my having the transfers in stock for years before getting round to the paint job.
If you can find waterslide transfers, proceed to flat the lovely gloss paint with 2000 grit paper, used wet with plenty of soap, and rinse well and dry carefully. It will look totally matt and you should then carefully apply the transfers the same way you put the Luftwaffe emblems onto your Airfix model Stuka.
After a day of drying, coat the whole thing with clear lacquer under the identical conditions as for the colour coat.
In my case, I had flatted the paint, dried the three parts, and returned to the shed to apply the clear lacquer. I would have skipped this process and applied the vinyl transfers directly to my shiny paint job, had I known. Oh well...
With vinyl transfers, unless you’re feeling lucky, it’s far better to wet the tank with water and a drop of soap, before positioning the transfer. This way you can move it a little till you’re happy, then exude the water carefully with finger pressure then dab dry with kitchen paper. All the bubbles can be chased
out from under the vinyl, giving a neat finish.
A day later, I wiped any dust off the panels, then waxed the finish with plain ol’ furniture wax, polished it, then sprayed it with the product shown in the picture. The shine allowed me to read the time on my watch in the reflection, which is good enough for me. From ‘total mess’ to ‘rather tidy’ for around a hundred notes – less if you don’t buy clear lacquer you mightn’t need. Good luck!