integerspin

What your talking about is zinc plating then a passivating chromate dip. The gold color is the dip, somtimes you used to see stuff advertised as gold passivated. The chromate dips come in at least three colors, I think the darker the better the corrosion resistance, but my platers don't do olive or blue, the steel on jap bikes tends to be done with olive, or does it. I haven't tried home plating. I do have a book about it that I bought in the 70's, but every recipe calls for cyanidesomethingorother so I think ingredients may be hard to get. I phoned a platers supply house in the midlands, basically if you get a few people who want to buy some stuff you can buy all the proprietry mixed stuff at less than the kits cost. I am told the proprietry mixes produce better finnishes than the recipes you find in books/internet.

You need a rotary bender for the thin tube. From memory they don't always use a mandrel when using the 'mandrel' bender so in effect it's just a rotary draw bender? I did alter a press bender so it was a rotary bander, it was a real bodge but bent thinwall ali tubing. If you look in exhaust catalogs they will probably list bends and straight pipe, well my 1982 Ti one does, I keep meaning to get a new catalog;-) Just looked at the Bosal online cat and it has bends and stuff. Course skip diving out the back of your local ex' place works. The place that used to do my Mandrel bending made proper 'nest of snakes' type headers, the only way to achieve the bends was sand bending. I sand bent 10swg and it worked amazingly but I couldn't achieve a tight[usable] radius on thinwall for headers.

More likely to cash in on it.

You could just put fittings in the jerry can, put them above the 'water line' and it will be fine. The plastic marine fuel cans are neat, but cost more than a jerry can and some tube fittings..

Funny you should say that I was going to say the Knipex ones are great but don't get a grip like the snap-on ones. My snap on ones must be almost thirty years old and they are still good, The joint is amazingly good when you consider most makes with open joint slip, and crush yer fingers, we used to do something regularly with the snap on 'swan necks' that needed a better grip so used to slip two pieces of pipe over the handles, they still didn't slip My only complaint is the plastic on the handles has gone, probably only lasted 20 years, should I complain;-)

My landy is out in the cold, I am putting an engine in it and the temp is so cold the dehumidfiers in the garage are frozen and the table of the mill has a layer of ice on it!!!!!!!!! I don't really mind working in the cold, I was putting an engine in a mustang xmas of 1985 and the temp was below freezing. You don't need to keep the temp at 60 to stop rust, just keep everything warmer than the air and it should be OK, a dehumidifer works fine untill the temp gets below ~5C

Fabricate the 'perches' yourself. I put some bought ones on a 9inch ford for someone, I usually fabricated them myself. I think the ones I put on were bought from Direct Connection[yank sturf]. If you want to look for them look up "spring perches". I would have though all yank speed shops sell them..

But you know if you don't get a toughbook, the hinges will break the case will fall apart the sceeen will, whatever sceens do... Course if you really don't want to get her a toughbook there is always Itronix..