To perform this conversion, there will have to be some modifications to the frame that involve welding. To prep for the welding, the paint must be removed down to the bare metal. The Virago frame has some areas of rust and appears to have been sloppily spray painted some time in the past. I wanted to start all the way down to the bare metal everywhere so I decided to sand blast the whole frame and engine since I can't fit them into my bead blaster!
You can see in the picture above that I set up a makeshift blasting booth in my yard using a tarp and some 2x4s. You can also see my sand blaster on the right of the picture. After masking off all of the various parts of the frame and engine that I didn't want contaminated with sand, I blasted both. When I blasted the engine, something really interesting happened. As I was blasting in the late afternoon and it was starting to get to be dusk, I noticed that the sand made FLAMES whenever it encountered the chrome covered components of the engine. The video below is a short montage of some of the action of me blasting and you can see the flames at the end of the video.
Pretty cool right? Totally unexpected as I had never sand blasted chrome before. So the frame and engine are both totally blasted now and ready for the next step. Here are some pictures:
Here's the engine, left side blasted, right side not yet:
And here's the engine fully blasted:
Check out my previous posts to see how it looked before. Anyone ever seen flames from sand blasting before?