Petrol tank ends

[Donald A]

I attach pictures of my ends, complete with dents etc - I have tried the best I can, with the two on the bottom, albeit with simply a ball pein hammer, and somewhat predictably, they are still a long way from right. The photo on bottom left does not show the small dents which are there.
I attach H-A's ends from "102 slowly coming back to life", on 8/9/09 at 5.26 pm - they are beautifully perfect
How is this done?
Donald A

[Hugz]

I've been awaiting a reply but alas none has been forthcoming. I recently took ownership of a jewellery making kit which included this old leather dolly. Soon as I saw it I immediately thought of its use in repairing tanks. I seemed to recall that a bag of sand has been recommended.

I have a few spare tanks that needs work and is something I would like to experiment with though the big bang does worry me. Maybe a male and female pattern could be made up that can be used with a press. One set in the world would be enough and ends could be done on an exchange basis. 102 and centuries.

My apartment is looking more like a factory these days.

[Donald A]

My problem exactly - the trouble is that the ball pein hammer is not the right radius, so leaves little dents. Should I be thinking of a Sealey £77 set of panel beating hammers and dollies?

Now there's a question for the fully qualified engineers out there - how difficult is it to make up the male and female moulds, and how expensive? There would potentially be a large market, given the number of 50's, 60's and 70's open flywheel seagulls out there

Donald A

[Hugz]

I had a mate that was a guild trained boilermaker and alas I meant to get some tips from him before he died! One thing that comes to mind is that soon as a dent is created the metal has been stretched so bashing back in shape is going to be difficult as now there is a slightly larger surface are. How do we shrink metal? Even contouring with a ball pein hammer would be stretching the metal. Panelbeaters may have answer to this. Here is an interesting article which mentions stretching. Maybe a a set of correct hammers is more important that the dollies.

http://www.autospeed.com/cms/article.ht ... s&A=113106

Presumably as we are working with brass, things should be considerably easier. No doubt we could send off some ends to India and they could knock off a thousand or so but like repro car parts they always seem to be slightly wrong in shape. Be nice to keep it in-house ie within the burgeoning seagull community. Another factor to consider is that if we promote peeps pulling tanks apart how many potentially big bang injuries will we create? Mind you the attrition will only affect the less capable of gull owners and hence lift the standard of the remaining

Ive always thought that rather than trying to possess all the skills to restore a gull we should consider specialising and trading our skills. As a sparky....what can I offer?

[headdownarseup]

A "trading of skills". Now there's something.
I'm a motor mechanic by trade,and working on old engines like seagulls should be a walk in the park for someone like me right. WRONG!!!
It's the little tricks of the trade that should be learnt along the way in order to overcome difficult situations when trying to restore one of these little gems.
Rusty nuts and bolts are second nature to me now,i do this kind of stuff every day at work.
Electrics have never been one of my strong points, so anything i can learn from others will surely help me as well.
Many years ago i worked in a vauxhall dealership and often used to spend time with the guys in the bodyshop,watching how they'd prepare and paint panels on cars (something i do a little bit of with the tanks on seagulls)
Panel beating is something i'm quite interested in having a go at (very usefull when it comes to bashed seagull fuel tanks) but as Hugz has suggested,to make a die of some kind to place a tank end into would be a much easier way of repairing.

A fully repaired fuel tank on an exchange basis (minus the paint) would be an excellent idea. Who's up for that challenge i wonder?

Many ideas but sadly not very much time to see any of them through. (my day job can really get in the way of doing what i enjoy most,SEAGULLING)

jon

[Hugz]

A "trading of skills". Now there's something....... A fully repaired fuel tank on an exchange basis (minus the paint) would be an excellent idea. Who's up for that challenge i wonder? jon

A very time consuming procedure from what I can gather. We would need a point system for value of seagull procedures to create an equitable barter system. But then again there is satisfaction from doing all by oneself and which is what this forum is about amongst other attributes.

Still like the idea of pressed ends. Presumably a sheet of brass would be quicker than utilising old ends which sorta defeats the purpose and not nearly as satisfying. Back to hammering the dollies!

Interesting watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vreETksRxHo

[Donald A]

Interesting. I find the Autospeed item a bit daunting - the red hammers look like the Sealey set (which was the cheapest I could find) but the dollies may be too big...?
I liked the 1942 clip, especially from about 8 m 40 secs to 10 m 20 s - the stake looked useful, but again, how does one get a tight radius that matches?

Pressed ends sound the best - if I am unlikely to achieve a proper job no matter how hard I try (my stint at plastering some time ago I think permanently traumatised me...) then what's the way forward to achieve H-A's result?

Donald A

[MorrisMan]

I believe some panelbeating hammers have a scroll shape on the face and as you hit the metal the scroll shape encourages the metal to move into the middle of the dent, and reduce the surface area slightly. I am not sure if this would work on a much smaller scale though.

To repair the tank properly, I think you could use a "perfect" example tank to cast a mould of the right shape, and then put damaged tanks into the mould and use hydraulic pressure to pop out all of the dents. This would of course be a big undertaking to build, any takers