Featured Refurb On The ‘69 T120.

With the carbs out of the way it’s time for another foray into the cold of the garage to set about removing the oil tank and discover what surprises lurk in there. First the battery carrier has to come out and what should have been an easy half hours work turned out to be a little more. Getting the nuts off the two brackets which were seized and the carrier out of the brackets themselves, which were rusted together, took an amount of persuasion with WD and applied force. After a while it finally came out sideways but I left any further assault on the oil tank until I’ve warmed up again.

 

13/1/25
This morning the garage temperature has just about warmed up enough to try out the Olympic Flame look-alike paint I’ve got to see if it gives a reasonable match to the original paint on the Bonnie. I’ve cleaned up the tank’s underside and masked it off to the nearest swaged line and sprayed it back to Silver Sheen, which has taken quite well. I’ve cleaned up and filled the damage around the filler neck and primed it up.

Meanwhile, I’m using the currently spare Tiger’s tank to practice the layering technique and see how good I can get the colour match. The Tiger’s tank has got to be stripped anyway for when I get around to painting that. Meanwhile I’ve laid on the base coat of silver and after drying out applied thin coats and allowing them to dry out for about a half hour until I’d got what looks, to me, like a reasonable match. That took about four thin colour coats before it looked near. I’ve got to let this dry out for a day before applying a gloss lacquer coat overall.

All this is really to try to keep the original finish as far as possible but it isn’t going to work. Really it’s going to need a full repaint but that’s going to have to wait a bit until I’ve got the mechanical side up and running. It will probably need a proper professional job doing on it. I owe the old bus that at least.