Lesson to all.  Always use the pillion for 2-up riding.  Those dents look like butt-cheeks to me.

I'm no help really, I would probably be looking for a salvage tank.

Serowbot wrote on 12/31/69 at 16:00:02:


yeah, and what's that funny smear in between the dents?    somebody made 2-up riding a lot more fun!!

i'm no expert, but it looks creased and it would probably be a pain in the @$$ to fix that.

ditto on the salvage tank.  good luck.

I'm in the proccess of adapting a five gallon Harley tank to my savage. It came with a dent in the left side where it had been laid down into a post or some such thing. Either that or it was hit with an 85 mph baseball. At any rate what I did, since it is going to be powdercoated along with the rest of the metalwork, was to drill a few small holes in the tank's dent, screw in a 3/4 in sheetrock screw and then use a claw hammer to pull the dent out a little at a time. Once the dent was close to rounded back to it's original shape, again since it's going to be powdercoated, I used a product called JB Weld to fill it in. Not only does that stuff stick to anything, can be drilled, sanded, is not bothered by gasoline and just about anything else you can think of, it also is about all there is out there that'll stand up to the 400+ degrees of the powdercoat proccess. The small holes in the dent give me the added comfort of giving the weld a better grip as well.

I then just sanded down the tank to shape the curve as best I could, starting with 40 grit and then smoothing out with 100. I was also filling in the left hole where the Harley folks put their gas gauge since I didn't want to pay the big gucks for a dummy cap to go there (or the much bigger bucks for the gauge). I made a metal disk to fit in that hole about a half inch from the top and held it in place with three longer screws into the gauge mount in there. Then I just filled the hole to above the top with more of the JB Weld. My only problem was that I tried filling the side dent and the top hole at the same time. The JB Weld takes several hours to set and wants to sag a bit on it's surface. So you have to do a couple of applications to build up the thickness you need. When I get the tank back I challenge anyone to find the dent or the left tank hole, and this is my first attempt at body work of this nature.

Oh, and by the way, the tank looks mighty fine on the bike. When everything gets back to me from the coating there will be pix if anyone's interested. It's a pretty easy mod, except for figuring out what to do with that little solenoid that opens the valves a tich during starting. Earlier here I was told that I could do it manually and I think that's the route I'm going. Everything else just gets a little re-routing and will be just fine.

Texas? Not the Texas I drove through. Maybe on I-40. It was 890mi the way I went (I-10). I thought the paint would fade before I saw New Mexico.

Bondo is one of those products that's so good, it gets misused alot.  Says on the can it's not for dents more than 1/4 inch deep, but that doesn't stop alotta people from building entire fenders with it.  

No suggestion on the dents but I have a black one with a dent and a good scratch of much smaller size I would sell cheap if you want another one to work with.

Drop me a note at P.martinson2@att.net if you are interested.

Paul

If I were you I'd get a replacement tank.

Then, fix the old tank, while enlarging it thusly:

Photochopped to slice the tank horizonally.  (With the top half of the tank lifted, pounding out your dents would be next to nothing.)  Add a 2 to 3 inch tall band of steel and silver-solder or braze back together.