So, I started on the tank. A few months back when we got the bike, we took the tank off my dad's GT750 and put it on the Titan, just out of curiosity. We thought our Titan's tank was shot just by looking at it- you can see, it's not pretty. A previous owner must have forgotten to sand down the big glob of Bondo on the side of the tank...and also forgot to paint it after applying that thick coat of ugly purplish-brown primer 30 years ago.
T500 tank
T500 with GT750 tankThe bike definitely wasn't as much of an eyesore after laying the GT tank on the frame. In fact, it looked awesome. But the tank wasn't mine, so at the end of the night my father put it back on his shiny '75 GT and I immediately went to eBay looking for a cheap, fixable GT tank.
After having a few near success stories with eBay, I decided that I should just save what I have for other necessary improvements and try to fix up my Titan tank. First, I dealt with the rust inside the tank.
The rust wasn't too bad. It certainly wasn't as bad as the rust in my spare Honda tank, and had no sludge or crap at the bottom. After looking at a few different solutions to a rusty tank on the internet, I decided to go the "BB-and-alcohol" route. Remove the petcock and seal off the hole, take a container of about 300 steel BB's, pour them into the tank, and shake the hell out of it. This did loosen up a good amount of the rust inside it, but also created this huge cloud of 30 year old rust particle when I opened the gas cap.
Steel BB's, alcohol, and mandatory Bloc Party.
The Michael Westen approach to gas tank cleansing:
Shaking a gas tank full of BB's is like shaking a guitar to retrieve the pick you dropped in the soundhole. You're never going to get it right the first time; you'll get it back in a few shakes if you know what the inside of your guitar looks like so you'll know exactly how to shake it. However, I don't know what the inside of my tank looks like, so it took me at least two hours to get all of the BB's out. Using a rubber mallet to tap the corners and edges of your tank for an hour will eliminate the 30 BB's in hiding you thought you got out the first time you shook your tank to death.
Oh, and magnets don't help you retrieve BB's unless they're on a flexible hook.
After wearing my arms and back out from all the shaking, I planned to run a hose through it to flush out any remaining crap...which turned out to be a bigger challenge than getting the BB's out. So like I mentioned, I live in Iowa where it gets pretty cold in the winter. I brought in a frozen hose from outside and let it set in my warmed basement for about 4 hours, thinking it would thaw in that amount of time. Well...it didn't. So, I took it upstairs to the garage and hit it with a heat gun in a few areas to loosen up the ice inside...That didn't work either. I gave up on the hose and went out and bought a garden hose the next week. Lesson learned: Garden hoses are still full of water when they freeze, and will not thaw until April. I spent an entire day trying to get that hose to work. Hey, I was desperate.
After successfully flushing the tank with water, I gave it a good flushing with alcohol to further clean it up and vacuum dried it for a day, so it shouldn't be too bad when we fill it up in the spring.
What's next?
After having a few near success stories with eBay, I decided that I should just save what I have for other necessary improvements and try to fix up my Titan tank. First, I dealt with the rust inside the tank.
The rust wasn't too bad. It certainly wasn't as bad as the rust in my spare Honda tank, and had no sludge or crap at the bottom. After looking at a few different solutions to a rusty tank on the internet, I decided to go the "BB-and-alcohol" route. Remove the petcock and seal off the hole, take a container of about 300 steel BB's, pour them into the tank, and shake the hell out of it. This did loosen up a good amount of the rust inside it, but also created this huge cloud of 30 year old rust particle when I opened the gas cap.
Steel BB's, alcohol, and mandatory Bloc Party.
The Michael Westen approach to gas tank cleansing:Shaking a gas tank full of BB's is like shaking a guitar to retrieve the pick you dropped in the soundhole. You're never going to get it right the first time; you'll get it back in a few shakes if you know what the inside of your guitar looks like so you'll know exactly how to shake it. However, I don't know what the inside of my tank looks like, so it took me at least two hours to get all of the BB's out. Using a rubber mallet to tap the corners and edges of your tank for an hour will eliminate the 30 BB's in hiding you thought you got out the first time you shook your tank to death.
Oh, and magnets don't help you retrieve BB's unless they're on a flexible hook.
After wearing my arms and back out from all the shaking, I planned to run a hose through it to flush out any remaining crap...which turned out to be a bigger challenge than getting the BB's out. So like I mentioned, I live in Iowa where it gets pretty cold in the winter. I brought in a frozen hose from outside and let it set in my warmed basement for about 4 hours, thinking it would thaw in that amount of time. Well...it didn't. So, I took it upstairs to the garage and hit it with a heat gun in a few areas to loosen up the ice inside...That didn't work either. I gave up on the hose and went out and bought a garden hose the next week. Lesson learned: Garden hoses are still full of water when they freeze, and will not thaw until April. I spent an entire day trying to get that hose to work. Hey, I was desperate.
After successfully flushing the tank with water, I gave it a good flushing with alcohol to further clean it up and vacuum dried it for a day, so it shouldn't be too bad when we fill it up in the spring.
What's next?
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