The last road block, or so I hope, was breached yesterday when I located the elusive ‘Arm & Hammer Washing Soda‘ at Fred Meyer. I’d tried all the other local establishments but they seemed to be a little too ‘high faluten’ for something as old-school as ‘Washing Soda‘.

In parallel with my quest for the chemical, I have been moving along with the body work on the gas tank.  It seems to be a never ending process!  I have professional body working sanding blocks and papers, and maybe using high quality products is highlighting every little low spot on the tank.    At some point I just have to relent and realize this is NOT going to be perfect.   I do not have a spray booth, and I can’t use multi-stage paints to get the really professional look.   So, maybe a little imperfection will be OK.

This is what it looks like right now after the 5th round of filling and sanding.

The rest of the low spots on the tank I can live with, but the high-spots where I ground down the mounting studs for the ‘Kawaski’ badge, I won’t leave that way.  They will look horrible once the paint is applied.  I may have to get in there with the grinder again and make some intentional low spots, fill, sand and move on.

Just fore reference, this is what the badges used to look like on this tank before I started:

More updates as they happen!

Conducted a little paint test over the weekend.  Hung up the parts, on a makeshift suspension system and shot some paint.

One panel, much like the gas tank, is still giving me some trouble.  There are pits from the plastic welding that just do not want to fill.  I have a new filling/sanding primer I’ll try out on the next round.

Here is a little closer shot of the panel that did work out really nicely.  The welding is not visible with the final paint color.

I know I can achieve the desired result with the other panel, I just need to keep working on it.  So far I’m very happy with the paint color choice.   But I can tell it will take a lot of work to get a good polished result with this paint.

A little more work done on the KZ400 today!

Yesterday while test fitting parts, I discovered that the powder coated Clubman bars are too thick and interfere with operation of the trottle.

At first, I tried to sand it all off.  I sanded and sanded.  All that provided was a scratched up, equally thick version of what I started with.

Then the lightbulb went off!  I probably still had the paint stripper I used to removed the powder coating on the wheels of my VFR (that project came out looking sweet!!!).  I did not use much of the stripper, and I seldom disposed of chemicals that are pefectly good, so off into the depths of my ‘chemical warehouse’ to locate the stripper.

A few minutes later I wheeled the bike out to the garage door (proper ventelation you know), donned some gloves and started working on the bars.    After the 2nd application it still looked like this!   I have to hand it to the manufacture of these bars, they REALLY used some tough paint!

In the end, I had to use a file to finish off removal of the paint.   BUT, remove it I did, and viola.. I was able to install the throttle and grip (sorry, no photo yet) and it worked like a charm!

A major hurdle out of the way.    Next post..   picking some paint to trail…..   I have….  an  *angle*…   🙂