Fuel Tank

I'm getting ready to paint the tank and fenders. To ramp up to this there is all the standard sheet metal prep work, but before that, I wanted to make sure the tank was in good enough shape to use. A lot of bad things can happen to tanks that sit for 30 years unattended. Even though this bike was always in a garage, temperature and humidity cycles can deposit condensation on the unprotected metal inside. It's possible that a tank that looks sound from the outside may have places that are essentially only paint and rust.

My tank looked solid from the outside:

  A few of the attachments would need some attention.  The petcock had leaked for months before I put the bike away (see petcock rebuild), and something had turned some of the rubber mounts to goo.  

To do an internal inspection, I first had to get by this bad boy:

Back in my younger days some of my so called friends thought it was funny to put fluffed up cigarette filters in peoples' gas tanks, believing that the fibers would eventually clog the fuel filter, causing hilarious trouble, but no real damage. They were right about the trouble. The key lock solved that problem, but now 30 years later, I seemed to have misplaced the key. I tend to keep keys, especially if I can't remember what they go to, so I had a pile of candidates.

None of them worked, of course, either because the right key was not among them, or because the lock was so corroded inside that it was siezed. I even read up on picking locks and tried for over an hour to pick it. While I could feel the pins move, I couldn't turn the plug enough to open it. Finally, giving in to my baser instincts, I got out the big drill. Even faced with this, the lock didn't give up easily--it had some hardened parts inside, I think. Anyway, half an hour later, success.