Tank Archaeology

Tank archaeology

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

THERE WAS AN ITEM ON THE NEWS LAST night about brain-tissue shrinkage in teens who sniff glue, nail polish and various inhalants to get high. After hearing a few of these supposedly brain-damaged kids interviewed, I couldn’t help wondering how smart they’d been before acquiring the inhalant habit. I mean, what kind of brain instructs a healthy body to inhale nail polish? I can’t picture Einstein suddenly rising from his desk and saying, “Jeez, I really need to breathe in some poisonous chemicals to see if my brain will shrink and render me useless to myself and society.”

Still, who am I to criticize?

There I was in my green garage coveralls, eating leftover Paul Newman spaghetti, watching the 5:30 news and reeking of professional-strength paint stripper and acrylic lacquer thinner while drinking “burgundy” out of a box with a collapsible plastic bladder. Which was cheaper per gallon, incidentally, than either the paint stripper or the lacquer thinner. Hardly a posterboy for non-toxic vibrant good health.

But at least I wasn’t rotting my brain as an end in itself. I’d been out in the garage, kneeling on old newspapers and stripping paint from the tank and sidecovers of my 1968 Triumph T100-C. At last.

When I bought this bike last year, the tank and sidecovers were encrusted in a remarkably thick coat of gold metalflake paint that had aged and yellowed to a kind of burnt bronze tone. You know the look-it’s the same color you see on 20year-old snowmobile helmets at garage sales, a purist, low-key alternative to the popular “Captain America” theme.

I should have painted this bike last summer. Every time I turned on the garage lights it was like getting hit across the eye sockets with a baseball bat dipped in glitter. Still, I did nothing about it because I couldn’t bring myself to take the bike off the road long enough to paint it. I put several thousand miles on the Triumph last summer, just noodling around the countryside, and saw no reason to cease and desist simply for the cause of good taste and ordinary decency.

Also, truth be told, I kind of got to like that ugly old metalflake paint. For one thing, it seemed to make the bike virtually theftproof, at least in my own imagination. Lock the Triumph up? Who’d want to steal it? The bad paint also allowed me to be absolutely careless of the bike in the garage. No fear of bumping that tank with a Weber grill or leaning a bicycle against it, no vain compulsion about zipper scratches or friends lifting their children into the saddle so they could hold the handlebars and make engine noises.

“Go ahead and drool there, Junior. What do I care?”

The Triumph had that friendly, utilitarian invulnerability you find in old, unrestored pickup trucks, the kind you can use to haul fertilizer without a bed liner, or carry cans of drained oil to the recycling center. Maybe we all need one vehicle like this, the motorcycle equivalent of what, in cars, we used to call a “deer hunter special,” before the invention of Eddie Bauer interiors.

Then too, one friend of mine actually suggested I leave the bike gold because it was “more historically correct.” His reasoning was that everybody has now restored old Triumphs back to original showroom colors and condition, when, in fact, many people repainted them some offbeat hue the first time they got a dent or a scratch in the tank. By the early Seventies, he pointed out, most Triumphs looked like mine rather than the versions we now see in museums. “It’s a perfect Age of Aquarius paint job,” he said, “and 50 years from now no one will know they looked like this. Your bike is actually more ‘authentic,’ more of an endangered species, than a perfectly restored one.”

That’s an interesting point I’m willing to concede, but not for long. If I’m going to have a bike that’s in bad taste, it has to be my own bad taste, and I have never really liked anything the color of gold but gold itself-excepting the lettering on a black or red motorcycle.

So there I was the other night, soaking up paint-stripper fumes like a sponge and pushing gobs of gold paint off my tank with a putty knife. Interestingly, I have noticed that paint stripper 5 seems to “sense” the division between coats of paint, taking off just one color at a time. When I stripped the paint off my old 1967 Bonneville in 1979, I had to descend through five distinct layers of paint, one at a time. Beneath the flat-black outer paint I found strata of metalflake blue, metalflake white, candy-apple red with green trapezoidal pinstripes and then, finally, the original “Aubergine/Gold” two-tone.

On the T100-C I stripped last night, the layers were a little simpler. Beneath the very thick gold (it must have been put on with a trowel) was a coat of plain glossy black, and under that I found the original “Hi-Fi Aquamarine” with silver center stripe. The sidecovers were the original black underneath, but the decals had been sanded off to make room for a pair of huge Triumph logos done in fishscale reflective splendor.

With my rubber gloves on, I ScotchBrited my way down to the metal on the sidecovers, but I left most of the original aquamarine paint on the tank.

I want to look at the color (however dull and patchy) and ponder it for a few days. Also, the original silver stripe is still visible, with its highlighted edge stripes, and I want to measure it before I destroy the evidence.

In the meantime, I have reached the point of quandary. What color to paint the Triumph?

Conscience and the weight of history tell me I should simply paint it the original aquamarine with silver stripe. It’s not a bad color, sort of a mixture of Mediterranean seawater green and Aqua-Velva blue, with bluebottle-fly overtones. I liked it when it was new, and still do, when I see a restored bike.

But.

Twenty-some years ago, when my friend Pat Donnelly needed to paint his Triumph T100-C (a 1966 version) he borrowed from me a leftover quart of British Racing Green enamel that I’d used to paint my old Lola T-204 Formula Ford racing car. And I have to tell

you, the bike looked stunning in green. Especially with that black, chrome and white Triumph emblem and black kneepads on the tank. The sidecovers, of course, were painted black on Pat’s bike, as they should be, and mine will be, too. Brightly colored sidecovers on Triumphs (to my eye) detract from the shape of the tank, which is one of the most beautifully shaped containers ever to hold 2 3/8 gallons of gasoline.

In struggle with the morality of this important issue, I called up my friend and aesthetic conscience on difficult problems such as this, Bruce Finlayson, interrupting an important coffee break and stream of consciousness about white cadmium plating. Nevertheless, he found time to talk about Triumph colors.

Perhaps sensing that I wanted to paint my bike British Racing Green, Bruce graciously assured me that, once you have done a perfect, original and correct factory-stock restoration on a motorcycle (as I have on four or five bikes), you have paid your debt to society and earned the right to paint your vintage motorcycle any damned color you want.

Thank you, Bruce. Later today, for further encouragement, I may call Editor David Edwards, who has a fine disregard for purity and paints flames or scallops on nearly everything he owns. I think he’ll go for the British Racing Green idea, too.

This could be fun. I’ve always done restorations with the phantom of some nameless, faceless museum curator hanging over my shoulder, passing judgment on each phase of the job. Essentially, I’ve done restorations for History, or for some future owner I’ve never met.

Maybe this time I’ll just do one for myself. Paint the tank BRG, make the bike look nice, but not too nice. Build a runner instead of an heirloom; make it good-looking, but not so good-looking it makes you nervous to have people walk through the garage. Or move the Weber grill or park a bicycle nearby.

And if parents want to set their kids on the seat, that’s okay too. If they scratch the tank, who cares? It’s just green paint, which is not the same thing as History.

Besides, we have to leave something for the next generation of restorers to complain about, and something to do. Otherwise they’ll just end up sitting around, watching TV and sniffing paint stripper, with no understanding of its proper role in a fully lived and well-rounded life. □