Progress has been made over the past two weeks.
As mentioned before the tank had many layers of old paint. I began the slow process of stripping them down one layer at the time:
More and more layers were revealed:
and more over the next couple of days including two separate silver/alu grey layers. Today's paint stripping products are not very efficient so I had to use moderate force using a metal stripping blade to peel off the paint until finally we reached something resembling an electro coating on the bare tank that would not shift with the paint stripper apart from a few gouges I managed to inflict on the finish.
Once the paint was off I thought that it would be a great next step to coat the inside of the tank with 2 component resin called PetSeal, an Ethanol proof coating:
I left the tank propped upright for the remaining coating to settle somewhere out of the way from the fuelpump well:
After several days of letting the PetSeal to cure it was time to fill in the most notable gouges from the paint removal process (used 5 years out of date Plastic Padding) and then I give the tank its first new coats of paint. First a few coats of etching primer. It too cold to spray really but the work just had to be done at this stage.
Then several more coats of high build primer with sanding and filling in between the coats at not amazing but not totally hopeless level of finish.
An uniform silver coat as I did discover those silver layers in the original paint:
and then the final paint code 675 red coats. I had to surround the painting area with some protection as the red spray was not exactly a mist but more like a wild stream of paint going everywhere:
The final result straight after the final spray and obviously without any polishing at this stage after perhaps 10 layers of 2K top coat:
The jury is still out on the paint match and also the finish shows some drips also as I went a bit too wet with the top coat on one of the layers but it feels great that the pain of peeling of the paint etc. etc. is now behind me.
Here is the detailed shot of the main corroded section which I didn't really want to hide too well. It's good reminder in the future of how much work went into this tank:
The odd colour and matte looking finish is the dull reflection from the cardboard surrounding the work area. The finish really is quite surprisingly good even without any post processing. I'll eventually machine polish the paint once I have left the coats to fully cure over the next several weeks. But this paint finish won't most likely win 2021 Irish Motorcycling Association Paint Finish of the Year award even after that.
It will do.
Oh yeah, fitted the fuel and temp gauges also and was able to hide the oil pressure sensor cable run behind the oil/water pump and the hall sensor cover. In the end I resorted in cutting out the OEM terminal and fished random wire though the obstacles and made the connection under said cover. It only took a couple of hours of fishing to feed the wire through.