• Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Sweden - About 1988 and older

  • Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

off white plastic gas tank.

Bigbill

Bigbill

Husqvarna
Pro Class
I tried some cleaner polish on my white faded plastic gas tank. It cleaned up to a tan color. It's not the bright white it once was. I'm almost tempted to use the red polishing compound to clean up the surface then wash and paint it gloss white.
I'm using the '85/'86/'87 gas tanks and seats on my '82 frames. I have up on the original gas tanks due to over pricing.
Are there any tricks I could do to get the plastic bright white again other than painting?
 
I used wet n dry sanding paper on mine. Started of coarse then worked up to and thru the finer grades. Then started using polishes too.

It seems to work to a certain extent but the acerbis tanks do seem to stain badly..

Painting seems a waste of time to me but I have seen some sealing products that are meant to keep the paint on!!
 
Bigbill said:
I tried some cleaner polish on my white faded plastic gas tank. It cleaned up to a tan color. It's not the bright white it once was. I'm almost tempted to use the red polishing compound to clean up the surface then wash and paint it gloss white.
I'm using the '85/'86/'87 gas tanks and seats on my '82 frames. I have up on the original gas tanks due to over pricing.
Are there any tricks I could do to get the plastic bright white again other than painting?
Click to expand...
youre going to mount the black and white single shock tanks on the 82 frames? you must take pics. are you going to leave the shrouds on?
 
You will find that premix stains permeate the entire thickness of the tank. You can sand enough that the tank will split at some point. The best to do is to seal the tank from the inside but stay away from Kreme and POR-15 as they both depend on solvent evaporation to cure. Caswell is the best as it is impervious to the fuel alcohol that dissolves POR-15 and Kreme. It is epoxy based and is very durable. It is very important to follow the Caswell instructions for prep and application. If you try to take the solution from one tank and try to treat multiple tanks from the same mix, the subsequent applications will fail because as it is poured out of the first tank , it has already kicked over and has lost the ability to adhere after the first.

After that cures you can paint the tank with PPG Deltron ; my first choice. The paint and primer needs to be flexible. SEM makes an excellent bumper primer that will work on Acerbis tanks after an application of adhesion promoter
 
The Answer to Your Question of can You make it White again with out Painting is NO. It depends on just how White You want it, and how Tan it is now. You can probably make it look a lot " Whiter " by taking off the top layers of Plastic. Steel Wool has worked the best for me. Start with #3 and work your way down. You can also send the Tank out and have it polished but the cost isn;t going to be that much less than having the Aluminum Tank painted. The Red Tank in my Picture is a Clarke aftermarket one with Decals.
 
You can get perforated white sticker sheets and was considering trying this on my 86 tank. However, if the tank was properly sealed would it be possible to use plain white sticker sheets (not perforated)? Would this look better?

It sounds like sanding the plastic will not restore its original colour- but is there any way of removing the oil stain from the plastic? Like soaking the tank in a tub of bleach or something for several weeks?
 
phillip has brand new 83 style plastic tanks for a reasonable price if thats what you mean by clarke tank
 
I just purchased two longer seats, two gas tanks to go with them.('86/'87)
I may polish the plastic to remove the small scratches then steelwool and try painting one.
 
Read the Sea Glow info, expensive product, so much so that this guys set out to come up with an alternative to keep his shoe soles nice and clear. The Sea Glow product looks interesting, but given tha the main source of yellow is from fuel, wonder if that would cause issues. I don't plan on giving it a try, would rather just slap on the MXM Graphics decals for white tanks.
View: http://youtu.be/d8Hd2Vkf6yk
 
Twin shock bikes are going to look terrible with single shock tanks and seats. Get one of the Clarke plastic tanks, they fit properly and look correct, plus the 2.2gal tank is all you will ever need for vintage competition and its narrow.

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The Bike in my Picture is using the Clarke 3.3 stolen off my other 82 250. I intend to order a 2.2 for this new build. Most non Husky people don't realize that its not original. The Plastic Gas cap in the middle is the biggest give away. The side decals are from e-bay the guy in Portland Oregon. They are very thin and are intended for a OEM tank that is dented and has had body filler used to restore it. I am looking for somebody to make some Thick Heavy Duty ones that will hold up better. I did not seal the inside like You are supposed to when using decals, and even did the worst possible thing and left fuel in the tank for a year or more by mistake. I have had no Bubbling issues at all. Oddly enough the 2.2 is listed as a white color only but an e-mail to them told me they could do a custom order and get it in Red. Really haven't seen a better price than just ordering from them direct. I also have one on my KTM 380 and the Cap Leaked for no reason, it looked as though nothing was wrong. A call to them had a new Cap sent right away with no charge , which for no apparent reason fixed the Leak.
 
oooooohh, thats nice info. i wonder if they would make black ones? would be sharp, and no more fading white issues.
 
The rivets indicate a merging of 1982 and 1983 panels. Just like the Bigelow 1982 works that Rick Horvat owns .
 
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