Grabbing a couple cans of Kleen Strip “Aircraft Paint Remove”, I set to work. It was tedious, but pretty darn effective. Nasty stuff, definitely follow the ‘wear protective gear/filter mask/do it outdoors’ warnings.
The dent, on the other hand, was -not- cooperative – but it clearly wasn’t the first time this tank had an issue as you can see in the shot above where there’s some old Bondo on the top – which had me really scratching my head about how someone got a dent deep enough to need filler -there-. Super weird.
In the end, after a bazillion attempts with the ‘hot-glue’ style dent puller, using upside down cans of compressed air to hit it with propellant to drastically reduce the temperature above and below the dent in an attempt to have the metal contract enough to ‘pop’ the dent out, and a few other methods that were entirely unsuccessful, I gave in and decided to Bondo the hell out of it. I used some of the glass filler style for the deepest bits, and then moved to standard filler once it was close-ish to smooth, then a bunch of skim-coats and sanding til it was as good as I was ever going to get it. Sadly, the photos of that process have vaporized. If I can ever track them down I’ll add them here.
So, all that was completed, and a new color was selected, a killer deep blue (I think it was a Toyota color, I’ll verify). I picked up a half-dozen rattle-cans and went to it. For the clear-coat I used the Eastwood 2k Gloss Clear, which was impressive as hell and surprisingly easy to apply (again – DEFINITELY use proper PPE for this process. That clear has some really nasty chemistry going on that you don’t want in your eyes or lungs.
So how’d it turn out after putting all the bits back together?