Time for paint, sort-of.
I had to come up with a top strap-mount for the battery hold-down system, so I got some more steel rod and bent it to shape, then welded it onto the electronics pan. As soon as that was done I hit the whole thing with primer and gloss black.
I wanted to go for a groovy black cylinder head, so a trip to the autoparts store to pick up some high-temp primer and matte black rattle cans was the order of the day. Tons of bubble wrap and masking tape were applied to keep my normal ‘oops, didn’t think it would spray there’ thing from happening.
Since I was in a paintin’ mood, for good or ill, I grabbed the tank and scuffed the hell out of it. I really do love that blue, and there’s a chance I might return to it one day (will explain that logic much later). But first – primer.
More than a couple folks (me included) thought the primer on it’s own actually looked pretty cool. I -almost- just hit it with another couple coats and would then do a satin or matte clear… but I wanted to try something a little more complicated. ‘Cause why not? I mean, the whole point of all this is to learn something, right? I also just realized in posting that last photo of the bike that I clearly had not yet taken the rear rim and tire to BMS to get mounted. Heh. It’s been a sec since I’ve done all this.
I spent some time on the Auto-Air website, trying to figure out what colors might generate a cool final tank. I knew I wanted to muck about with a touch of metallic, but not -too- much, and something that blended layers of green and gold. That was about it. I ended up picking these:
So I fired up my little air compressor and my cheap-ish spray gun that I picked up for doing guitar work from Stewart-MacDonald (another friggin’ amazing company!) and went to town, first laying down a deep blue-green sealer, then following with other greens and golds. I used a paper towel to blotch up what would end up being a sort-of undercoat with the hopes that it would add depth to the color. I was a little out of my league here, I’d done flat colors and clear coats before with modest success, but this was all new to me.
I -almost- stopped at that gold, but it seemed a bit too ‘shouty’ to me, so I hit it with another couple layers of green and BINGO. That depth and glow I was looking for really came out. Very pleasantly surprised.
So NOW I got the tire mounted to the rear hub and re-installed. Lemme tell you something, trying to get the brake mounting ridge into it’s corresponding slot on the swing arm while trying to get that great huge belt sprocket in place AND slip the axle bolt into place all at the same time by yourself is fucking HARD. I highly advocate springing for the cost of a beer and a friend if at all possible.
Since the color on the tank was very much to my liking, I ordered a couple more cans of Eastwood’s 2k Clear to seal it up since the Savage likes to spit a little gas out of the gas cap when it’s full. I set up a little ‘spray booth’ in the garage and set to it. I was on the final coat of (I believe) six – I wanted that clear to be as thick as possible on my budget, and disaster! The damn can spit propellant hard, just for a fraction of a second – but it was enough to screw up the job.
I tried hitting it with a little more clear in the hopes that it would melt and blend back in, but to no avail. I had a can of blush remover on-hand and tried that – again, no go. Dammit. I knew this meant sanding it back down and starting the clear over. Ok then. Sometimes you bite the bear and sometimes the bear orchestrates an incredible triple-heimlich-sakkow with an inverted holographic mandible masher. I figured I’d just set it aside for a while and move on with figuring out what the seat would look like.