Rebranding

14 May Rebranding

After a short hiatus and a hosting switch, we are proud to announce that the Fluid MotorUnion blog is back in the action!

Let’s start off with a story before we get into the pictures. This tank was sent to us by a friend out in the Pacific Northwest. The tank in question is an old Harley Davidson fuel tank, which we would be repurposing for use on the owner’s Yamaha bike that he is currently putting together. From the outset, we knew the general direction that we wanted to take with the tank. The tank came with a very interesting vintage patina; basically, it looked like it had been through hell and back, and that’s definitely an aesthetic we wanted to keep, but we had to make sure it both went with the Yamaha brand and wouldn’t fall prey to any sort of further weather-related degradation. So off to work we went. Here’s the tank, after the Harley decals had been removed from the side, the first step in our rebranding/repurposing.

After removing the old decals, we searched for replacement vintage Yamaha decals. Somehow, we managed to stumble upon the perfect design of decal we were looking for. Once we ordered them, when they arrived, we were a little let down because of their size. The round decals were roughly the size of a nickel, and the Yamaha badget was two inches long at best. Simply put, it wouldn’t do.

These stickers were just what we wanted, but they needed to be much larger. Since we aren’t able to cut custom vinyl, we contacted our friends at Proper+ to give us a helping hand. They took the stickers, scanned them, and cut us some custom vinyl from those scans. They managed to replicate the vintage colors to a tee, and they came in the exact sizes we needed. Best of all, this was all taken care of within a couple of days. And, as always, once we received them, the first thing to do was test-fit the vinyl to the tank.

The next step was to start the rebranding process for the tank. First, we started off by adding some vinyl pinstriping towards the rear end of the tank, to add a bit of color and to help reinforce the vintage aesthetic. We also dug into the vinyl a bit, in order to age it — after all, you can’t have minty fresh vinyl on top of a patina like this!

From there, we sprayed over the area where the old HD decals once existed. That way we wouldn’t have to sacrifice optimal positioning of the Yamaha decals in order to cover up the paint behind the old ones.

In case you were wondering how we’d attempt to protect both the new vinyl and the vintage patina already on the tank, there’s one word for that — clearcoat. Once the stickers were put in place and aged appropriately, we then covered the tank in a layer of satin clearcoat. Going full glossy wouldn’t do justice to the aesthetics we are looking for, and satin provided both a good level of protection while maintaining a near-original finish in terms of luminosity. Here’s two shots of the tank as the clearcoat dries.

And here she is, all ready to go. You can barely tell the clearcoat is in place, and we think it definitely worked in terms of maintaining the vintage aesthetic while still changing the brand on the side of the tank. Short of ditching the bike and having it land on the tank, it should be well protected for quite some time going forward!

Thanks again for bearing with us during our downtime — now that we’ve switched hosts, all that business is behind us for good. Keep looking forward to more and more original content in the days, weeks and months to come!