On the road again at 40.............the bike that is..........PART DEUX

Left the tank with Terry today. He was quite surprised to see those pinholes in that location at the top of the tunnel as opposed to along a seam. He will braze it for me at some point.

When I tapped around to test the integrity of the surrounding metal it seemed OK but he said he'll know when he puts a torch to it so we'll start with that before cutting and patching.

He then recommended I seal with POR-15 which he has in bulk. I know Pete's a fan of that stuff and used it successfully on Lucille.

I'll update when I know more.

Yup - I did quite an investigation back when I was resurrecting Lucille and POR15 is definitely good stuff (as sealers go). It is the stuff used by Jay Leno in his VERY expensive Dusenburgs and other high end restorations - and it reportedly can stand up to ethanol fuels which cause older treatments such as Kreme to break down.

Pete

robinc said:

Ok, thanks Jim. I'll get some muriatic acid and then test again to see how many more holes develop. And will go from there. Watched a metal artist from the area forming headlight buckets and gas tanks at a swap meet this summer. If a replacement piece is required he'd be worth talking to.

Thanks Brassneck, I'll look into that.

Haven't tried Evapo-Rust, but I did try Metal Rescue on my other tank and found good old acetic acid worked better.

Thanks for the ideas guys!

Click to expand...

Another good Product is Marine Tex, an aluminum impregnated epoxy I used for a sunken boat I restored. Oil, fuel and water resistant. Mix just a little and swipe it in with a piece of cardboard, like body putty. Fixed a quarter sized hole where the prow and keel meet, which gets blasted with every wave. still hard as a rock after almost 20 years

Dear XS650 friends:

I have some sad news to convey regarding our good friend RobinC. This afternoon, several of us received the following message from one of Robin's sons who used Robin's PM box to communicate with us:
______________________________________________________

Hello, this is Robin's son.
I'm not sure where to post this but I figured this would find the right people.
My dad unfortunately passed away this afternoon from what appears to be a heart attack.
I know this group meant a lot to him and I wanted to let those of you who knew him well know and I don't know how long he'll be kept logged in here.
Thanks for being a place where he could find a lot of joy. He spoke of this group all the time.
_______________________________________________________

I don't have any further details at this point in time. I can say that several of us got to know Robin very well over the past few years and a couple of us rode with him - even as recently as a couple of weeks ago. I think that I can speak for all of us who came to appreciate his enthusiasm, his endless good humour, his patience and kindness to everyone and his generosity with his knowledge.

He will be sorely missed.

I am sure that we can all draw our own lessons from this sad event, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out that there will be two especially poignant entries in this years XS650 calendar.

Pete

Such sad news. I copied MaxPete's post above to a new thread and moved all of the posts after it to that thread as well. I wanted to create a dedicate memorial thread for Robin that could be posted to the main page and not be lost on page 14 here.

Here's a link to the new thread:
http://www.xs650.com/threads/robinc.53426/

Thanks Travis.