Decided to do something with the old fairing as I’m pretty sure I wont be using it for the bike as will go Chinese when this Covid-19 is over. The OEM looked ok from a few paces but is faded and has suffered a lot of accident damage over the years, even worse than that it’s been repaired with multiple weird products and procedures. Some of those I could peel, chip or sand off, but they were certainly done by someone who valued function over form. It was going to take a lot of work to repair these panels, though ive done worse on the smaller bikes, but with the chinese bodywork so readily available and cheap, well... Seems a no brainer.
So, rather than have it sit in a box I figured if I did some repairs I could hang it from the garage rafters like I did with the nasty fibre glass 250/350 fairing and the horrible GRP LC2 bikini unit that had been cut down to fit an Lc by some DPO that I got from the council clearup. This time I figured it should be easier as I didn’t need to paint it, just do some repairs...
Hmm.... ‘some’... A nice ‘catch all” word. Of course it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. While one or two panels look quite good, all had suffered with missing or broken tabs so there were a lot of tabs to redo, although for some areas I did have the original bits as they were still connected to the bolts when they ripped out. Of course most of those ‘bits’ were junk, but they gave me an idea at least of what the original panel looked like for replication.
Here are some of the pics for what was done. I wont bore you with them all, this should just give you a flavour of the repairs, they were ‘plentiful’ lol.
As you can see where there were big cracks (the not very well pictured belly pan was really bad etc) I plastic welded these only at the back side so as not to make the painted side look worse. Without doing the front side these are not 100% strong repairs and if I was to use this on a bike that would need to be done. Anyway, strong enough for hanging in the garage of course. The tabs were redone welded fully as I don’t want this to fall no matter how unlikely that might be.
The worst of the lot, all fixings ripped out! The top edge of this mid panel had only one good fixing as well. How had that stayed on? Er, 100mph tape... Nice... Hmm...
The worst panel is finally repaired:
Bolted up and ready to have a bracket welded up to hang it
Here it is in, er ‘pride of place’ (not really, I wish I had a nice man cave to hang this in... Maybe at my next house!)
Obviously I have to the option to do more and complete the rest of the repairs if I was to decide to use this bodywork at a later date, ie if for some reason the Chinese bodywork supply dries up. Let’s hope it doesn’t of course!
