Now it’s time to look at finishing the fuel tank.

This is not in a single colour but is panelled.

Originally my old lady would have had her tank mainly in chromium plate with cream side panels with a broad red line outlining the panels, as seen in this clip from the 1937 sales catalogue.

1937 Sales Catalogue
When I first got her the tank was in a two-tone finish, chrome and rust!

To get her on the road I just wire-brushed the rust off, applied a coating of “Phoscote” and that was that!.

The chrome was heavily pitted and while in theory it would be possible to have the tank re-chromed the amount of polishing required to get down to a suitable finish before re-chroming it was not practical, not only that but it would seriously thin the tank body so I needed an alternative.

This turned up at the National Motorcycle Museum in the 1933 Model 100 seen at the head of this blog and I decided to use this finish of a dark green tank with light green panels.

After playing round with colour samples I settled on a light lime green for the panels and the old British Racing Green for the main body so it was pop down to the local car body shop suppliers to see what was available.

The tank had previously been primed and rubbed down before the hiatus in this restoration but had become a little chipped and marked over the fallow years so I gave it a few coats of primer followed by a witness coat and rubbed it down again.

This didn’t take long as the finish I started with was quite good to start with.

Now the main body of the tank is to be the dark green, so I first painted the tank in the light green!.

Why? Because it is much easier to mask off a convex curve that it is a concave one, there is much less risk of having the second colour creeping under the masking tape as it is not rucked at the junction between them and if you only paint the area of the panels you wind up with a junction line showing in the darker green area.

Painted Tank

The tank was then left for a week to harden off before I even thought of masking it so that the paint would not lift with the masking as it was removed.