Saturday In The Shop

 Saturday morning I didn't have to work and my wife had plans to leave town. This meant I would have time to dink around in the shop. The first thing that had to be done was a little bit of cleaning. I found a tote full of tools and realized they were from a past remodeling project. No, not the bedroom painting project from a few months ago, these were from the November 2016 bathroom remodel. Oh well, those and the ones in a tote from the latest remodel are now put away. I also found a box with the old valves from the Subaru project.

 Not a straight one in the lineup. This was the first time I had looked at them out of the heads. Pretty impressive the amount of damage that can be done from not changing your timing belt often enough.

 My wife had mentioned how cloudy the headlights were on that car so Friday after work I picked up a restoration kit from the local parts store. I chose the Mothers brand product because I really like some of their products like Back to Black. I've used this for a long time and really like the way it restores sun faded plastic on bikes. I see it now comes in an aerosol and I may have to pick up a can and try it. The headlights weren't bad enough to need wet sanding in multiple steps and the polish and bonnet supplied did a nice job. As you can see, the light on the left still looks like ass before the polishing.

 The outside temps were rising into the high thirties so I decided it was a good day to sand the sporty tank so I can paint it.

 I got some 60 grit paper on the orbital sander and started chewing away at layers of paint. 

 You may remember how this paint job got on the tank and the gold glitter I sprayed on in frustration. Well I'm paying for it now. It took two packs of 60 grit to remove that glitter paint. It gummed up something terrible but its all gone now. I was surprised to see evidence of at least three other paint schemes under the mess I created. 

 The purple with white lightning bolts is what the bike had on it when we bought it. I'm not sure what the green is about but I could tell it was taped off into a few stripes so thats two different paint jobs.

 I'm not sure how well this pic shows it but there is a blue flame paint scheme under here as well. I stopped sanding at this point and spent a lot of time trying to decide if I just wanted to squirt clear coat over the tank in this condition. I think it looks cool and probably better than whatever I'll come up with.

 I had this small can of 3M bondo laying around and once the sporty tank was sanded I wanted to fill a dent and also one or two on the BSA tank. Thats right, progress was made on the BSA. A lot more progress could have been made if the working time of this body filler would have been longer than 14 seconds. Seriously, you can see I'm holding the can up just by the stir stick that now won't move. I put a dab on the sporty tank, wiped it with a squeegee, did the same in two spots on the BSA tank and by then the stuff was hard. There was some other stuff to do on the sporty but I couldn't because my bondo was now a rock. I'll have to pick up some more and finish the job.

 While I was messing around in the garage I remembered there was one more piece of business that needed to be taken care of now that I'll be commuting in the Subaru for a while.

 Later.