Paint your motorcycle plastic tank and make decals stick

Many motorcycles such as offroad or motocross motorcycles has plastic tanks that gets miscolored in time. Possibly other vehicles too. Recent years popularity in restoring these bikes has brought up the problem in having these tanks, made look new again.

The problem is that the premix gas vaporates right through the plastic in time. Therefore, the miscoloration is not only on the surface, and cannot me polished, or sanded off. All attempts to paint the tank will fail. You will, sooner or later be able to peel off the paint making everything look worse than ever.
Furthermore, the decals won't stick.

The only permanent and lasting method is to make a tank skin. There are skins available from various sources. It is less work and cheaper to buy one of those instead of making your own. But if you can't find a skin or would like to make one yourself. This is "one" way of doing it.

Step 1 Method and material

The skin is made from fibre glass vowen, epoxy, putty and paint. It is possible that polyester based resin can be used instead of epoxy but I do not recommend it. Cured polyester will let vapors through and the risk of ending up with a skin with the same problem as the tank isn't appealing.

You need vowen for epoxy and real epoxy. Marine grade epoxy such as System three or MAS or others will do the job.

The putty can be made from mixing a filler into the epoxy such as small baloons or wood flour. Readily available 2 component putty can be used instead of course.

I recommend polyurethane 2 component paint. It will give a UV resistent, nice and durable finish. Any paint shop or marine paint shop will be able to provide you with a decent paint.

In short, the method is to saturate fibre glass fabric with wet epoxy and to build up a skin. 3 layers of vowen is sufficient to have a strong and rigid skin. Thereafter, you will apply putty, sand, more putty until the surface is decent enough the paint it.

Finally, a couple of layers of pant with some sanding will give you a nice finish and a lasting result.

Comments

[mpettit]

I've been told that one of the difficulties with painting a plastic tank is that they expand and contract with the fuel. How does your fiberglass shell deal with such a dynamic surface? Will it crack? Maybe force all of the expansion and contraction to the unfiberglassed portions of the tank?

I guess that your venting should take care of some of that. It seems to me that if a thing has to do all of its expanding in a very small portion (say the part that doesn't have the skin on it) of the surface it could cause cracks and other bad stuff (bubbles, weakness, etc.).

[mbha]

The skin is elastic enough to allow for those movements. The skin is almost a year now and has come loose from the tank, but looks great. This method is the only way that I know of to make a miscoloured plastic tank looking new with a lasting result.

Thanks for watching
//B

[camaxwelljr]

KTM ROCKS!

How does the movement feel when riding the bike, is it noticable or is just one of those things that you know its loose?

Also:
http://www.polyprocessing.com/pdf/technical/PaintingPEStorageTanks.pdf