Before you can even begin to consider painting or even priming your bodypanels, you need to make sure they are in a good state. Since I had bought a cheap tank from eBay for my Honda CB500, I’d pretty much set myself up for a fair bit of prep work. The tank looked pretty reasonable on the picture with the eBay listing, but unfortunately upon receiving it I found a whole lot of rust, dents and bubbling paint. Now I’m extremely stubborn and wanted to prove to myself (and others finding themselves in similar situations!) that with a bit of reading, and some cheap tools and materials from Halfords and High Street, I can restore this bodywork and make it look great after paint.

So as you can see, the tank looks decent (on a picture, not in real life!) with the paint still on. But some of the paint is bubbling, indicating that there is rust underneath it which will sooner or later cause it to peel off. Therefore I cannot paint over the existing finish.

In that way the state of the tank pretty much decided my next step; which (power)tools to buy! I impulsively went ahead and bought a Black & Decker Multisander from Argos (it was on sale…). It’s a random orbital sander which comes with a triangular base as well as a round one. However after trying to sand some of the paint off, I found that although it could do it (eventually), it eats up the sand paper way too quickly.

So today I went on another shopping spree and bought a little 600W Draper Angle Grinder. I know it’s not the most powerful one out there, but that’s OK; I’m not particularly strong (and for those that aren’t aware - I’m a girl) and the thought of having to wield a huge 900W angle grinder was not very appealing at all. I also bought a poly carbide abrasive disc to go with the grinder.

As soon as I got home and unpacked my stuff, my husband couldn’t contain his curiosity and immediately assembled the grinder, putting on the abrasive disc and taking it to the same tank. Turns out (in spite of its relatively low wattage) this grinder is actually quite effective. Have a look at 5 minutes worth of paint stripping:

We figure it will probably take 30-45 minutes to do the whole tank.

However, the rest of the body panels are made of plastic, instead of metal. So they will need to be sanded down with the multisander and by hand, which should take a fair bit of elbow grease.

UPDATE:

So last weekend we felt like making a mess as well as a whole lot of noise… The tank is now fully stripped, eating up the entire grinding pad. It took about an hour, but the result is not bad:

Note the big dent on it, well there are plenty more on this tank, so the next step will be trying to get rid of them somehow…