How to safely remove stickers from your fuel tank.
I cleaned my bike yesterday, long overdue! I decided to try to remove the warning stickers that has been stuck to the fuel tank since I bought the bike. One of them simply says “Unleaded Petrol Only” and the other one is a list of English words translated into French in case you ever need a French mechanic, what gives? Oh well, I’ll save the sticker just in case. I looked up the problem on Google and found out that it’s actually quite easy to remove these stickers. Just use a hair dryer! You need to apply heat to the sticker to loosen the adhesive, be careful though you don’t want to heat the paint too much as it might start to bubble. After applying heat for a couple of minutes it was easy to remove the stickers.
Many people recommend using heat guns and paint thinner, I haven’t tried that myself so I can’t really recommend that. Some also recommend using WD-40 oil to loosen the adhesive before you use a hair dryer, that’s probably a very good idea but since I haven’t seen WD-40 anywhere in Norway I haven’t tried this either (Update: You get WD-40 at Clas Ohlson in Norway!). Just using the hair dryer without anything else went just fine on my tank, but if you do have access to WD-40 it might help removing the glue residue that will be left on your paint after removing the sticker.
Oh, and one more thing; don’t use open flame! Not a good idea…
Links:
Motorcycle Cruiser: How to remove stickers from a motorcycle’s paint
Same article as above, but with great photos!
