Larry, I am sure not informed well on your alu welding skills but the way of doing it has many tight spots. You have always a trouble of leak in the end of a seam. Once I asked a friend of mine who had a welder (and some experience) to fix up my bike's clutch cover. He had it 3 times redone and there's still a fatt spot on it. As for the tanks I found a shop locally who put back in place the buffle inside my R-model aluminium tank. The weld broke down and the baffle was just laying on the bottom inside the tank. Those guys told me they gonna remove the end cap to get to the baffle and than put it back. I said "no" knowing the way things used to be and we ended up making cut out in the back wall, the frame side. Being in their shop I saw a lot of alu tanks re-done for European trucks. They're aluminium but not round ones, rectangular with smoothed edges. All those tanks were pretty deformed along the seams where end caps were welded to a main wall. To my ask the guy answered "Yes, it's always that way and we can't do it better looking". I noted that was a local shop. But I meant it was the only shop who did it I found on the net over the 12 million city, wich is the capital of the country. There's another place wich makes tanks nice but it's in Saint-Petersbourg, 700 km away. I'm going to go there to work out my second tank. And it's damn far more than 7 hours of drive.