I bedlinered the tank yesterday.
OK, now that you're done shuddering...
The original red tank has a lousy POR15 coat on the inside that's failing in an amazing and admirable way. Rather than deal with that, I set my sights on the "spare" blue tank the PO intended to clean up and paint instead.
Having worked with this particular bedliner before- there are a couple of guidelines:
1)Mask, Mask, Mask. If you get overspray on anything you didn't intend to paint, you will be a sad, sad person.
2) Prep, Prep, Prep. Sanded, sprayed with prep clean, and made sure it was as clean as it was going to get.
I didn't feel it necessary to do much more than score the heck out of the blue paint because as oxidized as it was it was a nice, rough bonding surface for the bedliner, which sticks like a demon to anything it touches.
In this case I masked off the white stripes with Frog Tape and used a mechanical pencil to outline the edges of the white, then ran an exacto knife over the lines like a stencil to remove the excess tape. Worked a charm!
Spraying bedliner is tricky. This is the duplicolor stuff. Used it on the tops of my saddlebags (where they get boot scuffed because I have short little legs) and my bicycle's suspension fork (because it'll get beaten against bike racks etc) and it's proven itself pretty durable overall.
Duplicolor bedliner sprays perfectly when you have a full to 1/4 full can. That last 1/4, though, will NOT spray right or reliably, unfortunately- it tends to shoot too much paint with too little gas, with a result like big foamy bubbles of goop. This happened to my airbox covers (not shown) and looked a little less like cowhide leather and more like ostrich skin. I managed to fix it for the most part, but if I ever "show" this bike, I will be covering those covers. (the inner black ones with the brass bullet, not the outer "vented" ones with the badge)
After spraying the suggested 2-3 coats, you'll want to let it dry to the touch, and then trace all your masking again with that exacto knife. Why? While the bedliner is still somewhat pliable, it will want to adhere more to itself than to the painted item and you can actually pull it up as you unmask your piece. Not acceptable. If you leave it for too long, though, this adhesive property will make your masking one with your piece forever. Also unacceptable. I found the process pretty similar to skinning out a deer or something.... lots of tracing, then work a little bit at a time.
Here's the finished result:
The rock chips in the white will be cleaned up and filled when I can find the time and a suitable white touchup paint...
I was looking at the HONDA badges and thought "Well those were sunfaded as all hell, weren't they?" so I went over those, too. Brush and paint this time, though...
Hoy! Much better!
Didn't get much of anything done today, though... oh well.
