Anyway, first step has been to strip off the old paint, and I've been using these plastic stripping wheels. I used them extensively on the underbody surfaces, which were not sandblasted when the rest of the body was stripped of old paint.
Although expensive (the 4-inch grinder mounted version was $24) they last quite a long time if you keep them away from protrusions and edges. I used probably 33% of the life of one disc to do the entire fuel tank, so this works out much cheaper than the faster-wearing but cheaper sandpaper discs, and the plastic wheel is much less abrasive to the steel underneath, while still stripping the old paint quite quickly.
It took about an hour to remove most of the paint from the tank, and a little more around the seams, in the grooves, and around the fiddly bits with some wax & grease remover and a scouring brush. Next is some cold gal spraypaint- this is a primer containing some sort of powdered zinc- so it's a sort of cut-rate galvanising process, though the results are far from as good as galvanising- as long as it avoids being scratched it will do the job. This is currently drying in the garage, and tomorrow I'll squirt some flat black top coat over it, and when that dries, it'll be ready to go back in the car.
Cost of this job:$75.19 (paint, stripping wheel)
Time taken: 3 hours, plus the time it takes to apply the flat black
I'll have to give a plastic wheel a go. I've been using a wire brush that sits in my die grinder to clean a lot of crap of parts which works really well. That and scotch brite clean up just about anything.
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