Gas Tank Restoration / 1982 WR

Restoring a 82 WR Gas Tank - Blue with Gold stripes and bushed alum insert. Having some trouble with the gold stripes. Anyone with experience on painting these tanks? My problem is getting a smooth transition between the blue / gold and raw alum - any good ideas ??

Check visteur1948 thread here for 1981 430CR and others. It is tricky because the paint will always be above the painted surface. You paint the striping by masking the bare panel to the inner edge of the stripe. You then mask the outer boundary of the stripe leaving the stripe width between. Make sure you do not touch any surface to be painted with bare hands as your skin departs oils and silicones that will leave you with tormenting fisheyes. You would be best off by using an airbrush to lay down the stripe paint with the lowest film height possible just barely achieving full color shade. You will need fine line tape to get sharp stripe edge. The idea here is to keep the color coat and strip coat to be equal height

To get the final transition you want, hopefully you are using a nice 2 part paint like PPG Deltron. The clear coat over the paint and bare panels need to be built high enough to wet sand the clear and polish smooth.

Thank you sir...the alum metal inserts have been my problem. Hard to get that right. Going to get it another try here - see if I can get better results. Thanks again.

By the way. when you look at Visiteur1948's thread and get to the fuel tank, you will find he did his tank by powdercoat. Even trickier still!! What have you been using for paint process thus far? Rattle cans are the worst for what you are doing at this point. A small compressor and an HVLP touchup gun are more than enough for most anything motorcycle related.

Those bare panels on the tank are not inserts. The tank is aluminum and that is the side of the fuel tank.

http://www.cafehusky.com/threads/82-250-xc-refresh-dwarf-build.34763/#post-345636

I too failed on the stripe on first attempt.... The second go went a bit better, Taped off the inside of the stripe and shot the gold, then taped off the gold stripe with 3m 1/4" pinstripe tape and shot the black. The 1/4" tape is just a shade wider than original though reasonably close.

Best of fortune

5mm might be correct then