Motorcycle tank repair, paintless dent repair?

[UKBrad]

Hello.

I recently and very foolishly made a dent in a friends motorbike by knocking a heater of a shelf on to it and need to have it repaired for him.

I was under the impression I could have a paintless dent repair done to it but after messaging a local company received this reply....

"Hi,

Thankyou for your enquiry. Unfortunately fuel tanks are among the worst things you can Dent!! 99% of fuel tanks are double skinned which means they have an inner skin and an outer! This means you can't access the Dent from the inside! So the other option would be to pull from the outside but again this doesn't work well on fuel tanks as the metal tends to be quite thick!!

So in a nutshell the only option would be to fill and paint it! "

Not the news I was hoping for as that sounds very expensive is there really no hope with have the dent pulled out?

Thanks

[Beehive Bedlam]

Easy option is to cut all contact with friend.

Alternatively you could try your luck with one of those ebay dent pullers.

[Tracer1234]

[A100man]

[MCN]

If it has a dent and it is on a clearly visible area of the tank then paintless may not be an option. Tanks are looked at so any tiny defect becomes more obvious than if the ding was on a large area of a car panel.
Regardless of how many skins, the fuel tank material will probably be thicker than car body panel. A typical SCRATCH and Dent repair on a car would probably cost as much as asking a body shop to paint repair the damage.

And pics or it never happened.
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[Kickstart]

Hi

Not sure on any tanks being double skinned. Although a lot of modern bikes tanks are plastic with a cover.

However metal tanks tend to be quite thick metal, and compare to car panels quite curved.

I did get a dent taken out of an H100S2 tank, but it was a very mild dent. Barely visible and in the middle of the (fairly flat) side.

All the best

Katy
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[tony_d123]

I know someone who has used these people with good results https://www.motorcycledentremoval.co.uk
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Blackpool, Lancashire

[Rob Fzs]

Just had one of my tanks resprayed, they repaired a dent by welding a bar on the dent and then pulling it out with a slide hammer, made a good job
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[Ste]

This thread needs pics.

The chances of being able to cleanly pop the dent out and not need to touch up the paint will mostly depend on if it's a 'smooth' dent. If there are any corners / edges to the dent then it's almost certainly going to need repainting.