PROGRESS REPORTS

Sheet Metal

I brought the sheet metal parts (fenders, tanks, primary covers) to the powder coater. The primary covers were chrome but the chrome was not in very good condition. Also, the pictures that are shown in Palmer's How to Restore Your Harley Davidson show that the primary covers were black. So I had the primary covers powder coated in high gloss black (like the frame). The picture below shows the covers after powder coating but because I took the picture outside in bright sunlight and the black is so shiney it looks like they are chrome - but it's really black. The other parts (fenders and tanks) I had him burn off all the old paint/bondo and sandblast them to get down to bare metal.

I managed to score an original rear fender (it even had the original Guide tail light). You can see that the fender has some wrinkles on top and a jagged hole. Other than that though, it is real solid. I brazed the hole in the top to give a good solid base for the body filler.

Once all the paint and bondo was off the tanks I could see what I was dealing with. I knew about the dent in the top of the left tank because that one was put there after the last time it was painted, but the two dents in the right tank were new to me.

I am also planning on putting repop 57 tank emblems on it so I removed the original badge mounting brackets and ground the spot welds down. The repop emblems have an adhesive mounting bracket so I will just smooth over the old mounting bracket locations with filler.

Update 6-15-04

I prepped the tank with POR-15. It's a very tedious and time consuming task, but I am very pleased with the results. POR-15 sells a motorcycle tank kit which is shown below. It includes the Marine Cleaner, Metal Ready and the sealer. I probably did not need to use the cleaner in my tanks because, as I mentioned earlier, I had them run thru the burn-off oven at the powder coater which essentially removed any trace of gum or varnish from the inside of the tanks. The Metal Ready is a kind of acid etch. After sloshing this around inside the tank and letting it set in different positions for 15-20 minutes so that all the inside surfaces are thoroughly treated you have to flush it out with water. This isn't specifically mentioned in the instructions but someone else posted somewhere that they talked to the folks at POR and you don't want to spray out the inside of the tank with high pressure but rather just pour some water in the tank and slosh it around because the Metal Ready leaves a coating on the metal that you don't want to remove. Then you have to make sure that the inside of the tank is bone dry before putting the sealer in. I used a shop-vac with the hose attached to the exhaust side and let it blow air inside for a couple of hours. Then I taped a piece of tissue paper to a wire and shoved all the way down into the farthest recesses of the tank and it came out damp. So I took a short piece of garden hose and attached it to the end of the shop-vac hose so that I could get it all the way down into the tank and let it blow air for a while longer. This time the tissue came out dry so I put the sealer in and roll the tank around and around so that all the inside surfaces are coated. Pour out the excess and put it in the other tank and do the same thing.

This shows the stands that I made to hold the parts for painting. Pretty crude, but it gets the parts up off the floorso that you're not blowing dust all over them while spraying paint. I am no expert painter so I am basically following the procedure described by Dave Murray. Here the parts have been primed.

Here the parts have been shot with the color - Midnight Blue Metallic. This picture really doesn't do the color justice - I think the parts look several shades lighter in this picture than they actually are. The picture below of the tank with the white panel on the side is closer to what the blue actually looks like.

Obtaining this paint in acrylic lacquer was a major coup in itself. Antique Cycle Supply lists in their catalog all the old Harley paint colors, but when I called them he said that they can no longer get the binder or something that they need to mix the paints. It seems that the EPA has just about shut down production of lacquer paint supplies. I went to my local automotive paint supplier and gave him all the information that I had on the color that I wanted and asked him to see what he could do. He even called Harley Davidson and they told him that they don't deal in old paint colors and in fact they have licensed all the old paint formulas to Antique Cycle Supply. By now a couple of months have passed since I talked to Antique Cycle Supply so I called them again and he said that he just got a supply of blue so he will be able to make the color that I want. Of course, because of the law of supply and demand, the price is now $120 a quart.

This shows the Birch White panel on the side of the tank. According the Bruce Palmer's How to Restore Your Harley Davidson, this paint scheme is really for the '58 model. The '57 has the white on top and the line between the dark and the white is a different pattern. Like I said elsewhere, I am doing a rebuild, not a restoration. I like the '58 paint scheme better and, besided, the metallic blue just looks so cool when the sun shines on the metallic color that I wanted the dark on top. Not only that, but these are five gallon fat bob tanks so they're not correct for '57 anyway.

By this point in the process I have:

Sprayed the bare metal with etching primer
Sprayed several coats of lacquer sanding primer
Sanded the primer
Sprayed 4-5 coats of color
Lightly sanded the color to remove the roughness and overspray
Sprayed 6 coats of clear
Leveled the clear coat with 600 grit so that there are no surface imperfections and the surface is smoooooth
Sprayed 2 more coats of clear

This next shot just shows the top of the tank after it has been sanded with progressively finer sandpaper up to 1500 grit.

The next several shots show the results after wheeling it out with rubbing compound, then polishing compound then a 3M Hand Glaze. I am very pleased with the results - it turned out every bit as well as I had hoped it would.

End of report

This page last updated on December 18, 2006