Wherein I either make a seat or a fool of myself, and also other things with the bike

Stick at it Nash - you'll get there! You have certainly done a great job to date. As my old Grandpa used to say..
"The only difference between a poor carpenter and a great carpenter is a bigger hammer, two pounds of putty and some sandpaper."
So....go for it.
Pete

Hi Pete,
about carpenters:-
back when I was a pre-teen alcoves came back into fashion so my Dad was tasked to remove our living room's
built-in cupboard in order to create a second alcove to match the existing one on t'other side of the fireplace.
As he pulled out the last of the 100+ bent snaggly nails into brickwork that held the thing in place Dad said:-
"Christ was a carpenter. I doubt that the clowns who installed this cupboard will get into Heaven when they die."
 
Got my boss to spray the final coat of primer last week while he was priming some other stuff. Went in today and blocked the primer down with 320 and then just passed over it by hand with some 400 real quick.
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With that done and wiped down I started spraying the silver and killing time between coats watching the Nashville Predators play hockey like they were filing their taxes. Pretty much everything went OK, though I ended up with a couple small blots of thinner on the tank with one of the coats. I probably should have used two racks to hang the parts instead of hanging them off the one, as them being so close together is probably where the globs came from, but shit happens and it's fixed now I think.
silver seat.jpg

There is the seat, and apparently I should've wiped my phone camera lens off before taking the pictures because that one came out fuzzy. It's looking pretty good in person. I took the seat out and then just sat around waiting for the tank to dry enough to be able to do a quick sand job on the spots on the tank, which of course ended up right on the top just in front of the filler. It looked good enough after a bit so I wiped that down again and sprayed some more.
silver tank.jpg

And there it is, still slightly wet. The plan now is to hope all that dries well enough in the less than perfect weather tonight and then mask it off and spray the red tomorrow. Took a close up of the top of the seat cowl where you can maybe see some of the metal flake in the silver.
silver up close.jpg

So, until tomorrow.
 
Some really good and some really bad today. Some bang your head against the wall crap, but first the success.
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Parts in the sun, very happy with the silver and the flake.
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Sanded the areas to be painted again back with 320 and 400 and got everything taped up.
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And putting red on things. In between putting red on things did some AC work on the wife's car and my truck. Taping things for paint sucks, especially when they are curvy and round.
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The seat turned out pretty nice, had some spots where the red bled past the tape so it'll have to be cleaned up a bit before clear coating. Aside from that it's turned out as well as I could hope.
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There is the spot that bled through.
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How about one with the tail light just shoved in there? And now to the good stuff...
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The two pieces together, and if you have a big enough screen and look closely, you can see that the tank is fucked and is probably going to have to be painted again. I don't understand why but the tape etched into the silver on the tank real bad all over the damn thing. What makes no sense to me is all the paint work on the two pieces was done together no more than a couple of minutes apart and there isn't a single mark I can find on the seat. I'm happy about that obviously as I want to repaint both pieces even less than I want to repaint the one.

I wasn't thinking at the time and wish now I'd taped the back end of the seat differently as the line of the red doesn't line up properly with the shape of the cowl on the very back edge but at least right now it doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it. Tonight is just shit for now because of the tank. I'm really hoping I can hit it with some thousand grit to get it smoothed back out without cutting through the color. So just, bleh.
 
I don't understand why but the tape etched into the silver on the tank real bad all over the damn thing.
Silver and gold bases can be finicky. Here's how I deal with 'em if I have to mask 'em..... paint the base coats and then shoot a medium coat of clear. Once the clear's dry, I'll scuff it with a red scotchbright, wipe it down and then do all the masking. Clear protects the base from the tape. It's an extra step.... but you never have to chance a redo. Hang in there bud... you'll get there. :)
 
Painter's tape is about like post-it notes; not sticky enough to pull anything up.
 
I use vinyl pinstripe tape for clean lines, and then blue painters tape on top of that as a border which can then hold the paper or plastic garbage bags to cover larger areas. But then I also peel it off before the last coat dries to ensure it doesn't bleed and the lines stay clean. Works well from my experience.
 
It's some brand of painters tape I can't recall off the top of my head. Owner likes to avoid 3M wherever possible with stuff. It's not something we have had problems with in the past, just one of those things I guess.
 
Well, I sanded Friday after work for a while trying to get the tape marks out of the silver on the fuel tank to no avail. Then I went in today and sanded some more and cut all the way through the silver. Goody goody I taped the thing off and resprayed silver on it, which promptly messed up. I'm cheap and not a painter (have I mentioned that yet?) so the color is just from a spray can, and the last can I got to use today was spitting the occasional glob of thinner. The good news is.....well, I'm just done anyway so fuck it.

On to better things that are even easier to mess up. I bought some stuff to make an actual seat cover, which is something else I have no experience in, and an even more vague idea of how to do it. So here goes nothing, and by nothing I mean starting almost from scratch again as my pattern is gone with the guy that quit. I do remember the plan and the measurements of the lines though so that's something.
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Made a new pattern, and cut some vinyl, or vinyl like material as I've already forgotten what it is specifically. I cut two of them to use on either side to sandwich the foam to create the pattern in the cover.
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There is the pattern on the back side of the bottom.
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And the pattern on the top side of the top piece in crayon that was whenever it's finished I can just wash the marks off the top. That's where I am now, I've got some thread, again since my first bit of thread is also now gone. All that's left to do now is the simple matter or spending a long time sewing the pieces together following the pattern.
 
Looked it up on the receipt, arctic black vinyl. In the store I think it was listed as poly something or another, but I'm certainly willing to believe it's vinyl, said it was perfect for outdoor seating so it's what I got. Now I just need to get it together correctly, I started sewing on it last night and after about an hour of work realized what I was doing wasn't working the way I wanted. I started going around the outside but it's pulling the layers across each other, having thought about it more I probably need to start in the middle and work my way out. The stuff I've sewn so far doesn't look terrible though, it looks really terrible, but decreasingly so as the line went along. It's been more than twenty years since I've sewn anything so maybe it's coming back to me.
 
Things happened!!
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That was Thursday, my boss sent me those pictures from where he clear coated the stuff after work. It doesn't look great up close, but even at five feet it looks awesome and that's good enough for me.
So tonight I put the stuff back on the tank and put the tail light and rubber pads on the seat cowl, got home and put them on the bike.
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I've still got to cut down the rear fender and fashion a license plate mount and barring weirdness that'll happen tomorrow. The seat cover is another matter and progressing at a glacial pace. Maybe having the thing otherwise ready to ride will give me the kick in the butt I need to make that happen. Loving things right now though.
 

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Making stuff happen, specifically chopped the rear fender
fender piece cut.jpg

Cut this bit off, which on the off chance someone is irked by cutting up a factory fender this one had some shitty rust patchwork done sometime in the past so it wasn't a good one anyway. So I cut it there pretty much even with the back end of the frame where it hoops over. I didn't take any pictures of doing the work between there and painted but at this point doubt anyone cares. Welding to the fender was a pain in the butt though with the edge wanting to just burn back with practically no heat put to it yet. It's hidden up under the cowl with everything down though so I just did what I could and let it fly.
fender with tag bracket.jpg

I may regret this part later, but it'll be easy to repaint at a later date it shit starts flaking even worse than it already is. I ran my fingernail over the part that looks like bubbling paint and nothing came off though. This was Rust Encapsulator as a priming coat to cover the weld because it didn't sandblast in around it. I put another coat of a more glossy black after that.
ready for seat cover  1.jpg

ready for seat cover.jpg

So there it is now, tag hung and fender in place. You can see the wonkiness of the back edge of the cowl pretty clearly here where I screwed it up but right now I just don't care. I'm more bothered by the paint coming off the frame in various places now than i am the back edge being crooked. Not bothered enough to do anything about it right now though.
ready for seat cover 2.jpg

Bonus picture of things in a not really all that dark garage. Best part of this was that the engine was running at the time when I haven't heard the thing run since November. No more excuses to keep the seat cover from happening now.
 
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