Sunday, March 7, 2010

Painted bottom half of fuel tank

Today was simple. I flipped the fuel tank over and refinished the other half.

BMW100307-01

Recently I was bragging about what nice weather we have been enjoying. Well, this week winter finally arrived in Honolulu. Today was rainy and overcast. Which is good because we need the rain.

BMW100307-02

The tank prep work began like last week with cleaning out little pockets of surface rust with a wire brush in a die grinder. This was followed by a thorough sanding, to remove some over spray and to roughen up the existing paint to give the POR-15 something to hold onto. The tank has a lot of flat areas so I did most of the sanding with my CP sander. I did the convex curves mostly with a block sander, and the concave parts with a sponge sanding block.

BMW100307-03 BMW100307-04

This time I did take a picture after painting. Two in fact, despite it looking like a big black blob. I used a sponge brush (cheap and discardable) and although the paint brushes on very nicely, it does tend to run on the vertical parts. If I were spraying I would say I needed to add a little thinner. Not sure if POR-15 can be thinned, or if it would help. Perhaps a better solution would be to use a conventional brush and try to apply less paint.

For my fill-in task I finally went looking for a tire that holds air. Found one, and with some help got it mounted. For now the car sits level. Hopefully next week that corner will not be flat again.

No comments: