Some years ago the Square Four got a new fuel tank in original paint from Yeoman’s Motorcycles. It was pretty shabby but it still had the coach lines picked out in gold paint to show where the Ariel craftsmen put them all those years ago.
As you can see the paint is very faded. The Square Four wore this tank for several years but eventually I decided that it was really too far gone. I didn’t really want to repaint the whole tank and lose all the patina, so inspired by Graham Ham’s book about his Speed Twin ‘Daisy’ I resolved to clean up the paint as best I could and enhance the gold lines a little bit.
The areas that were worse affected were around too weld repairs where the tank badge carriers had been refitted. The paint here was burnt and discoloured and no amount of rubbing down was going to bring that back. I used a matching spray paint (from stock I had accumulated years ago) to blend these areas in to the rest of the paint. Rubbing all the paint back with various grades of wet and dry from 240 to 2000 brought the tank back to life enough.
I then used some old jet black gold lacquer and some 3 mm PVC masking tape to put the lines back in. When these were mostly dry I rubbed over them with a dirty glove to dull them down. This works reasonably well when I timed it correctly but if the paint was too dry it didn't pick up the dirt from my gloves.
It needs more work of course, but it's getting there for sure.
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