Workshop
decent, second-hand fuel tank for my BMW R100 a few years back. Not an uncommon bike and regularly being decimated by some grinder-wielding, sockless moron who thinks it’s easy to ‘build a café racer’, so there should be plenty of good, used tanks. With damaging E10 petrol and our bikes getting older, it is going to be an issue more of us will face. But I kept seeing prices ranging from £200 to £400 – for 30 to 40-year-old fuel tanks. Have they been sniffing the contents? BMW ones may last longer than most as the factory sealed them from new (a red oxide-style finish inside), but they can still suffer from pin holes if they have been left with fuel in. Plus, the standard red sealer is particularly obstinate to remove, sometimes needing to be sandblasted, which you have to if putting in a new sealer. So, a second-hand tank could end up costing about £500 to repair, even before painting. Then, while losing myself in the world of eBay for Norton ES2 parts one evening, I saw a number of ‘brand new’ tanks available. Some were painted, some bare, and others were even chromed. Details of which of the many variants of the Norton single they fitted were scarce, but the price? About £250 to £300, or less than £180 for bare steel. With
