DT1 flat track project

Here is the seat pan repaired and painted, and waiting on the new foam and cover to arrive.


The brake pedal had some rash.




I welded it up and smoothed it with a flapper wheel.


Here it is sand blasted and ready to paint, along with some of the seat brackets.


When I bought this bike it had metal MX style footpegs, which are not good for a flat tracker, so I'm just swapping them for the stockers on my DT3. The MX pegs are perfect for my DT3.


The tank was fairly clean, and just had faded paint and 6 or so dings and one bigger dent.


The dent was just above the badge on the right side.


I pushed out the dent and dings as much as possible. A wooden rod with a rounded end works good for small dings, and I bent a piece of flat steel to work the dent. The important thing here is to not create any high spots, but just get them as close as possible.


The dent came most of the way out. This keeps the body filler to a minimum.


From the factory the tank was painted white, and then the stripe masked, and the final color applied. To make is easier to get the stripe back in the same place I made a template for both sides of the tank using some paper and a crayon.


The stripe mostly follows the body lines in the tank, but this will just make it quicker and take the guess work out when repainting.


Since the underside of the tunnel was left bare from the factory and had surface rust, I was going to sand blast anyway, so didn't use any chemical strippers, but went straight to blasting. This way there also isn't any stripper hiding in areas like the badge mounts or fuel filler that can come back and cause problems later when painting. The blasting leaves the perfect surface for body filler and primer adhesion.


I'm using Bondo brand filler, denatured alcohol for surface prep, and Dupli-Color self-etching primer. The Bondo brand (which gave body fillers the generic term "bondo") gets a bad rap from years of misuse, but I think it works fine if used correctly.


3M sand paper works great. I use a metal file on the body filler before it sets up completely to minimize sanding. Just let the file follow the contours of the tank, not pressing down, but just the weight of the file. Meguiar's backing pads are awesome for sanding. They are stiff, but flexible, so much better than sanding blocks on a tank like this where there isn't really any perfectly flat surfaces.


First the filler, getting it a close as possible, and then the self-etching primer. This primer goes on and sands very nicely. It also shows any high or low spots very clearly when sanding. I don't use high build filler primers anymore, since they tend to crack and shrink, and I want to keep the primer coat thin. I'll just use body filler for any small areas that need more work.