Tank Finish Question

I am thinkin bout stripping my tank down to bare metal and possibly putting some pin striping on it and whatnot. Question is: What is the best way to get a bare metal tank looking good? I figured I would strip the old paint off and then use different grades of sand paper (lower to higher grit) to try and get a bit of a shine to it. Not lookin for a chrome kind of shine or anything. BUt I basically jast wanna get it to not rust on me. Would a clear coat stick to it good enough on just the bare metal...or should i just use alot of wax???? any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

also one more question - I am thinking about brazing some brass rods to the tank for decoration...whats the best way to do that...should I drain the gas and fill the tank with water??? kinda dont want the tank to blow up in my face so...haha

cheers


p.s. - the tank is a steel tank

Talk to JRK about some of the PC finishes he can do - real nice stuff. But you can't PC over over any bondo.

There's a thread somewhere about draining a tank properly. DO NOT fill with water. Open the filler cap and put it up against a cars exhaust pipe for about 30 minutes. Dries out any gas.

sweet - thanks man! Yeah I'm on a bit of a budget lately, possibly buying a house, so prob would wanna try to find a good rattle can clear coat

Yeah, search for that thread. I wanna say it was Diesel540's? Or maybe by Goodfornothing's? I can't remember if it was a build or in 1800help

I'm interested to see if something good comes up here. I have had trouble with the metal rusting even behind the clear. This was most likely a prep issue, though. Loudbike (mysta2's cb350, it was co-bike of the month for December) has a bare tank, but he rubs it down with wd40 everyday (or some other insanely frequent period). Another guy was saying that he waxed his but that he still had to pull it off once a month to get all of the rust back off. I've also heard that most clears tend to yellow over time when applied over bare metal. I want to go with a bare tank on my next project, so I'm very interested.