Finally some cool work happening! I talked with a welder friend about this project, and he generously volunteered to help me weld up my subframe. He also said that he's welded motorcycle tanks before and suggested that I find the style of tank that I want and we'd make it fit the frame. That really freed up the replacement tank selection.
I went down to a motorcycle salvage place I recently heard about (Redhawk Cycle Salvage for those of you in the Portland, OR area) and picked up a gorgeous Suzuki GS1100 tank for only $40! It needed a cap, petcock, and some TLC, but it's exactly the shape I was looking for and the price was right. Out with the old, in with the new!
Here's how it looked on the bike today after I got the old paint stripped off:
As you can see, it sits up too high because of the frame. It only interferes in a couple places, though, and we should be able to fix that up no problem. You can also see the new headlight all rigged up and lookin' fine.
After I stripped off the old paint, I sanded the whole thing and started bondo-ing a couple small dents. This is my first time using bondo, so it turned out pretty rough. I'll need to go back later and fix it up some more.
In other news, I did some work on the exhaust over the past couple days. When I first took them off, they were looking pretty bad:
I spent a lot of time sanding and wire brushing these things to get rid of some of that rust. Then I used a whole can of flame-proof spray paint on them and wrapped them up. They're looking a hell of a lot better now (despite my noob wrap job), but I need to get some high-heat clear coat for the unwrapped portion of the pipes...
Still lots of work left, but I feel like I'm finally making some good progress. I'm really torn on whether or not to make the new subframe. I think it could look a lot better, but it's about 1000x simpler to keep the current one with all its handy bracketry... Hummm.