11/27/06

Welcome to  the Virago Body   page.

Now comes the "body" work. He did a tank slapper at some time and the wreck left a big dent in the side of the tank. I fill the slapper dings and the dent just so happens to be on the side that the gas gauge is on so with a lot of finagling through the hole where the gas gauge is normally mounted, I manage to get 90 percent of the dent out and use filler to even it out.

 I take this to my buddy Jose's to paint it. I want a nice metallic red medium dark paint. We look through the 1/2 pint leftovers. There is some of that real nice Ford metallic red they just came out with, a Chevy s10 blazer metallic red, some other red with pearl, and something else. So we mixed it all together and looks like what I want and we paint the gas tank.

 I come back tomorrow and take it home and set it on the bike. It looks dorkey with the original blah red of the other covers. The battery cover is gone, the air cleaner cover is broken so I sand the cleaner rough spots smooth, buy a light from the salvage that came off of some kind of Yamaha that is bigger than what was left of the original on the bike, clean up the headlight mount and the little covers under the front of the tank and the little piece above the tail light. We paint those also and now things are looking good!

 The front fender is missing so I go get scalped for one at the salvage that, after getting home and cleaning up find the chrome is worn off and slightly pitted. It's not like there's an excess of these parts around here so I put it on. It's better than the one that didn't exist.