Incompetence rules

[fredintoon]

Bypassing the problem to find a minor hitch.

Well, my self-disastered Standard tank is now up on the dead gas tank shelf with the other one that has rust pinholes in it.
Good ol' Andreas Weiss came through for me big time and my clean & shiny inside Macho Maroon Standard tank arrived this morning. The paint on it is so good that I must decide, do I paint the tank Astro tow truck orange or paint the sidecovers and the sidecar Macho Maroon? My thought that the Standard tank will fit right on a Special is true. Fit right on, yes. Get the seat back on once the Standard tank is there, not quite. Effin' Special seat's nose is perhaps 1/2" too long for the seat tongue to reach it's frame pocket. Carefully take the seat cover & foam off the base so I can cut the base short and make a notch for that accursed filler pocket drain tube. Tomorrow I develop my re-upholstering skills.

[Dragon Tamer]

Fred,
Good to hear that you got the problem solved, paint the side covers, they are smaller!
Was just about to load up one of my micro MIG welders in a saddle bag and offer to run up there and weld it up for you, now will have to think up another excuse for a ride.

[fredintoon]

Hi Dragon,
thanks for the kind thought. My oxy-acetylene rig got the tank sealed up again OK though it would have taken a whole raft of Bondo to hide the Frankenstein effect.
Paint the sidecovers, yes. Paint the whole effin' sidecar? I think not. Besides, I LIKE the orange.

[Dragon Tamer]

Hey Fred,

How did that re-upholstering job on the seat go? Just curious as I may have gotten a line on a standard tank and would like to go the same route some time.
Pictures would be nice, they help me to fit my feeble old brain around new ideas!

[fredintoon]

Seat shortening

Hi Dragon,
alas that pix are beyond my tech skills.
Strip the seat down to the bare steel pan. Be careful prying up the spikes that hold the cover on or they may break off. If your seat pan has a plastic U-section strip around it be sure to carefully save it for re-use. Use tinsnips to cut off a ~5/8" strip from the front of the pan and make a notch in the new cut edge to clear the Standard tank's drain tube. Put a steel block in your vise sticking up enough to act as an anvil and use a ball-pein hammer to beat a 3/16" edge upwards all around the new cut edge. Do a trial fit with the Standard tank in place to make sure there is enough clearance before you rebuild the seat. After you have done the shortening job take the opportunity to fix the rust. The paint on the outside of mine looked great but there was a whole bunch of rust under the pad. Trim off the foam pad to suit the shortened pan, a bread saw works OK for this. With the cover off I took the opportunity to line it's top surfaces with 1/2" thick soft foam. To stick the foam in place and to stick down the front of the cover (you cut off the front spikes, right?) I used contact cement. Be real careful to put the cover back on so it ain't twisted. Don't bend any of the spikes back down until you are sure the cover is on straight. It took me a few tries before mine looked right. And yes, the seat is now back together in it's shortened form and looks no worse than before.

[Dragon Tamer]

Thanx Fred,
Got that one printed out, will let ya know how it worked if I get that tank.

[Hammerhead1st]

Must be the weekend for upholstery...

did mine today as well, after it suffered the digestive tract of my Saint Bernard. She chewed the whole front corner off!!

For mine, I left the old cover on....what was left of it...and masked off a form that resembled the old corner. Filled that with expanding foam, shaped it, stretched new material over the old, used the spikes, underside bolts, and neat construction-grade silicone to hold it in place. Total price: less than $20 at Wal-Mart for materials, and the silicone came from work. I'll post pics tomorrow.

Too bad your tank project took a turn. But at least now you have one that you arent afraid to slice and widen to fit about 36 liters as opposed to the original 24, right? You have another tank there that's pinholed, the two might make one great gas can!

And you can pre-dent the seat end of it to accept a regular-sized seat!!

[fredintoon]

I swear I'm cured of that

"Too bad your tank project took a turn. But at least now you have one that you arent afraid to slice and widen to fit about 36 liters as opposed to the original 24, right? You have another tank there that's pinholed, the two might make one great gas can! And you can pre-dent the seat end of it to accept a regular-sized seat!! "

Hi Hammerhead,
My about to be 24 litre tank capacity plus the auxiliary carrying rack with the 8.4 litre jerrycan in it gets me up to 32.4 litres without any jumboising being needed. And that's without the main luggage rack's ability to carry a 21 litre jerrycan in addition. Not that I can carry the 21 litre jerrycan if I bring my wife along as she don't like her luggage sharing the main rack with a gasoline container.
The seat lost 5/8" off it's nose, is all, and one doesn't sit on that part of it anyway.

[Hammerhead1st]

I was thinking about trying to a line from the minivan to my bike for enroute refueling...kind of like air to air refueling. But I just can't seem to get the configuration right. Guess I'll have to stop every 140 miles...

[fredintoon]

Range

Hi Hammerhead,
it's not about driving 140 miles without stopping, or even the 90 miles that a Special tank on a sidecar hauler will get you. My aging body has to stop, drain itself and have a rest, a stroll and perhaps a snack far sooner than that. It's planning an entire trip around NEVER being able to go anywhere that has gas stations that are more than 90 miles apart that really sucks. Hence my jerrycan-festooned rig and my Standard gas tank misadventures.