Post by JonW on Dec 3, 2019 3:40:39 GMT 1
Flushed with the success of the full fairing, I decided to have another go and see if I could transform this horrible LC2 bikini fairing:
I’ve had this hanging from the rafters in my garage for 5 or 6 years now. How I came by it is quite a bizarre story. I saw an ad on a local forum for LC parts posted by an occasional forumer who had pretty much a whole LC for sale in parts and had a few bits ‘n bobs that I needed. He wasn’t far from me so I dropped him a line and arranged to pop round to pick the parts. When I got to his house he explained that he already had a nice LC (and he did too; a Mars bar was sat on the driveway looking very sexy indeed) and he had come across another one while out ‘n about, I think he said he was on the way home from the pub!
What you need to know is that in Sydney all areas have a twice yearly ‘Council Clearup’. This goes on weekly in different areas of our huge city and bi-annually they bring the trucks to your area and residents are encouraged to put out anything too large for the normal bin by the roadside and they will collect it for free (well it’s paid for by you in your rates of course, but you get the idea).
Passers by are allowed (or they just do it anyway and no one seems to complain) to ‘recycle’ by taking anything they fancy from these piles of trash and I’m sure some of it appears on ebay the same evening as some of the stuff is still good, although most is really just trash. When we put out our old leather sofas someone cut all the leather off them in situ and I’ve also seen people with small trucks and utes going round collecting up alloy scrap. For sure more than a few livings are being made by driving round the ‘burbs collecting stuff; “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” as they say.
Anyway, long story short the seller had found a whole LC in the clearup and pushed it home! (read that again... Yes... A free LC!)
Ok, it was a horrible bike and back then I’m not sure anyone would have paid much for it if you’d tried to sell it as it was completely (and I mean ‘totally’) painted in metallic Maroon paint that was dirty and chipped. Some time back someone had obviously loved it and put time into it, but it had fallen on very hard times and been stored badly for a long time, eventually being left for dead. Who knows, maybe it was left in a shed or in the under a house when someone moved house, maybe they died or their folks finally had enough of it sitting there (I’m sure many of us have had that discussion over the years! Haha!). As an aside, about 12 years back I drove past a Honda FT500 parked in the clearup near my house but had to be somewhere for a meeting, a hour later when I drove home It was gone. This was a shame as I had an XL500R to restore and could have done with the parts since those bike share the same engine. Ahh well, ‘snooze ya lose’ I guess! FWIW I’ve never seen another bike since on my travels and of course I always look lol!
So, the seller decided he would use the frame and engine cases to turn his bike into a matching numbers machine (yes the thrown away LC was actually numbers matching!) and along the way sell the parts he didn’t want and I was there for some of those bits and bobs. Nice bloke and I’m sure he’s built a nice bike out of it but he’s dropped off the forums now it seems so who knows. I had hoped to have his old frame and we did a deal but I’ve not heard from him for a long time so assume that he sold it elsewhere sadly.
We chatted as I walked back to my car with my arms full of parts and at the end of his driveway I noticed his own pile of trash for the clear up. Sat on top of it was this bikini faring. He explained that the PO had cut down this nasty cheap LC2 GRP fairing and fitted it to the LC, painting it in maroon like the rest of the bike. It was left with only one angle bracket and the other fixings were ripped out, perhaps that damage occurred in the removal though. I asked if I he minded that I grab it and he laughed and asked why I would want it? However, anyone who knows me will know that I don’t like to see things for our bikes chucked out and figured I, or someone else, might find a use for it.
However, maybe he was onto something as in the last half a decade while it’s hung in my garage not one person has asked about it. Sure, it was ugly and broken and the paint was falling off, but I’d have thought someone might have taken a fancy to it as had they asked they could have taken it home. Those questions happened a lot with the OEM LC2 faring I had hanging there to be used on my LC2 build. Eventually, knowing how freebies seem to freak people out (or they never turn up to collect them), I even advertised it on the for sale pages of my website with a price that might spark a conversation with someone, but still there was zero interest... Until now!
...and that interest was: me! And again even for free I felt like I’d scored an own goal once I started working on it. I really don’t like old used GRP!
With the cracked screen off this is what I was left with:
First job was to add back in some of the fixings. It should be noted that I had no intention of ever using this panel on a bike so the fixings were really just for me to be able to hang this up when it was finished, so I used some Wurth epoxy to glue some bolts back in where the old ones had been pulled out.
Im not 100% sure how these fixings were used on the LC to be honest, but I figured if I had some places to bolt on some brackets I would at least have a chance of hanging this up when it was done.
The original remaining fixing only needed its rusty thread cleaned up and some glue to close down the split in the GRP where it was twisting out of the fitting when pressured.
And two new ones added in.
Those were initial photos, I later went back and filled the areas around them with more epoxy to ensure they would be fully bonded into the panel, not simply ‘glued on’
With the fixings done it was time to get rid of the awful maroon paint and then repair the gel coat cracks and the missing chunks. It really looks like this panel has had quite a life! Marron over silver (maybe its the base of the maroon?), over duck egg blue which was on top of the white gel coat. The blue was probably the most endearing, being Gulf like, but not for me...
Time to grind out the damaged Gel Coat. It seems the ‘arms’ that run along the screen of all these GRP fairings crack as they are obviously too thin and are easily bent beyond what they can take, the GRP being quite brittle really. Gel coat is not hard to grind though but you can see why car and bike restorers hate this kind of bodywork, it makes you realise how much better plastic is as a material for fairings.
You can see here how cheaply/poorly this panel was made. In manufacturing the gel coat, which is applied like a thick paint, follows the contours of the mould and has flowed all the way into the headlight rim area as expected, however fibre glass sheet does not readily bend into sharp curves without being worked and left to its own devices will straighten back up and not reach into this kind of area. Really this mat should have been two pieces (rim and body) with GRP sheet for the main part and either a separate piece or loose fill pushed into the rim area. The upshot for this panel is that there is a sizable gap between the gel coat and the fibre. Gel coat is brittle and upon being given a smack it’s cracked in this area as there is no fibre to support it. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, I guess it wasn’t an awful job as I can see that it hadn’t been repaired before and as we know its lived a few lives before I got it!
And onto repairs. I used some of my favourite plastic repair product to fill in the cracks. This is a a 2 part epoxy so would add back in some strength even though this isn’t designed for GRP, rather than just use a filler like I did last time. I should say that I only used this as I don’t own any GRP resin and I was not only keeping this a budget build by using what I had handy but I also find it messy stuff to use and this Wurth Replast is the complete opposite being perfectly easy to use as it is applied with a simple ‘gun’ dispenser, goes where you want it and cures fast, even their slow set version sets up fast. Lovely stuff! When doing this work I decided to strengthen the rim that I would fill in the headlight adjuster holes. It’s not being used on a bike, so why not.
The rest of the paint was sanded off and then onto primer and paint:
Firstly some primer
Then some of the same white I used on the other art project (it’s a full fairing off an 85 on YPVS if you’ve not seen it) as I had half a can left over, no sense buying new when I have this handy...
Ive said this before but this paint is bizarre in that the gloss seems to drop out over the days after application. With a pretty flat application it will still reflect, but it’s much more satin than the advertised gloss. A problem for those thinking it’s a one shot deal, not for me as I will put on a gloss top coat.
I wet sanded back with 1200 and it was onto the next layer... I decided that as I had half a can of red left over from the other fairing I’d paint on the ‘decals’. These are meant to be budget art projects, buying the odd can of paint here ‘n there is acceptable but outlaying cash (and waiting for) stickers was never in the plan. Plus I got to have a go at doing this, so why not?!
This was the scheme I was going to try to follow, but the red-on-white version. I only had a poor quality photo of that colourway but both these give the lines to follow:
Laying out the lines, doing my best to get them straight and also level across the two sides. As usual a little extra time spent on this goes a long way to give a better finished result.
Masking up...
Paint goes on. I’d uncovered the upper line in this pic for the next colour so you can see how this is going to work
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www.2smoked.com/Photos/0157a694-ef35-4409-b6f9-dd5a439f0142.jpeg
Next I re-masked and painted the lines. I actually started by using some matt black I had to use up. I know these are blue originally but I didn’t have any and this is art, not for a bike of course.
The problem was that the paint I used was a different brand and reacted by drying cracked. I gently removed as much of it as I could while it was still wet with some wax and grease remover (very gentle stuff but does work well to remove new paint) and then hit it with some metallic black from the back of my paint drawer, I think I repaired a KTM with it back in about 2010, eeek! Much more successful this time, but the worry was if all my cleaning up had ruined something else... Hmm...
The acid test... Removing the masking...
A few little marks from where the cleaning up of the cracked black paint with copious W&G remover had allowed some black ‘juice’ to seep under the edges of the line tape where they cross each other, a place always hard to seal. I figured I could get this out fine with a gentle sand later and it was a small price to pay considering the paint issue i’d had.
The colours needed some time to fully dry out so in the meantime I decided to work on the screen. This was pretty dire and normally it’d go in the bin based on the splits and scratches alone. The problem is that I don’t have another LC2 screen lying around spare and who knows how well this panel would fit with an OEM unit anyway. So, I set about working on it. I cleaned it up, sanded back the wear on the underside from where the GRP had been touching it and vibrating some gouges into the perspex and also all the ‘over spray’ of superglue the PO used to stick not only the (now lost) trim down, but in his slap dash efforts where he got it all over the place, even at the front lower edge of the panel! It was probably on his fingers when holding the screen while gluing. Poor workmanship but easily fixed, just more time sanding and polishing.
FWIW I’ve tried lots of polishes and potions on screens over the years. T-Cut, ScratchX, Polywatch, Mothers and Meguires plastic and headlight (polishes and also kits) but the best has been my most recent find; Aldi’s headlight kit. This kit is apparently made in Germany and has some local approvals from testing, all nice to read but the main thing is that it has worked a charm on my Evo’s headlights as well as on screens and is a lot less work than the other products. You do still need to run through the sanding grits, but it’s surprising what you can achieve with a minimal sub $20 spend and some elbow grease.
With the main polishing and cleanup done I quickly masked it up and painted some satin black on the underside after using a lot of wax n grease remover to clean up the whole screen otherwise the paint wont stick (nor will the tape) to the polished areas as this polish obviously has some silicone in it.
It looks ok I think for what it is, but you can’t totally polish a turd of course – Jimmy Carr suggests you can roll it in glitter of course, but I digress. I was never going to be able to remove or fix the huge cracks or the pink colour (yes I did check and it’s right through the material). The kindest thing for those cracks is to bolt it back onto the panel as that will support it at least, but that would have to wait until the sanding, clear and more wet sanding and then compound and then polish work was done....
With the screen just needing a final polish once its fitted it was time to get back to the bikini fairing... Yes, more wet sanding... The sanding knocked back the heavy painted and raised areas near the taped edges, helping the colours blend into the background white layer more evenly. Then it was hit with coats of clear and left to dry.
Another wet sand and then a going over with compound and finally with polish gave me this (here being tested with the cleaned up screen after the repaired holes were redrilled in the fairing):
I then painted some black on the ‘dashboard’ area that sits under the screen as I’ve seen when people don’t do this that it looks funny, and of course Yam did it on their bikes so why not. After that all that was left was to mask up and paint the black on the inside (this was in direct response to feedback... there really were moans about the last garage art project that the insides were not painted! Lol). No pic of that, it’s just some boring black lol
And finally with sticker added and some polish and a coathanger repurposed as a hanger off the upper mounts, I have this in my rafters:
I do plan to fit a headlight to this, Im just trying to source the parts required. I have the headlight and some bezel / rim parts but not enough to put them all together yet.
So what do you think? Worth the effort or should I have just binned it?
I’ve had this hanging from the rafters in my garage for 5 or 6 years now. How I came by it is quite a bizarre story. I saw an ad on a local forum for LC parts posted by an occasional forumer who had pretty much a whole LC for sale in parts and had a few bits ‘n bobs that I needed. He wasn’t far from me so I dropped him a line and arranged to pop round to pick the parts. When I got to his house he explained that he already had a nice LC (and he did too; a Mars bar was sat on the driveway looking very sexy indeed) and he had come across another one while out ‘n about, I think he said he was on the way home from the pub!
What you need to know is that in Sydney all areas have a twice yearly ‘Council Clearup’. This goes on weekly in different areas of our huge city and bi-annually they bring the trucks to your area and residents are encouraged to put out anything too large for the normal bin by the roadside and they will collect it for free (well it’s paid for by you in your rates of course, but you get the idea).
Passers by are allowed (or they just do it anyway and no one seems to complain) to ‘recycle’ by taking anything they fancy from these piles of trash and I’m sure some of it appears on ebay the same evening as some of the stuff is still good, although most is really just trash. When we put out our old leather sofas someone cut all the leather off them in situ and I’ve also seen people with small trucks and utes going round collecting up alloy scrap. For sure more than a few livings are being made by driving round the ‘burbs collecting stuff; “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” as they say.
Anyway, long story short the seller had found a whole LC in the clearup and pushed it home! (read that again... Yes... A free LC!)
Ok, it was a horrible bike and back then I’m not sure anyone would have paid much for it if you’d tried to sell it as it was completely (and I mean ‘totally’) painted in metallic Maroon paint that was dirty and chipped. Some time back someone had obviously loved it and put time into it, but it had fallen on very hard times and been stored badly for a long time, eventually being left for dead. Who knows, maybe it was left in a shed or in the under a house when someone moved house, maybe they died or their folks finally had enough of it sitting there (I’m sure many of us have had that discussion over the years! Haha!). As an aside, about 12 years back I drove past a Honda FT500 parked in the clearup near my house but had to be somewhere for a meeting, a hour later when I drove home It was gone. This was a shame as I had an XL500R to restore and could have done with the parts since those bike share the same engine. Ahh well, ‘snooze ya lose’ I guess! FWIW I’ve never seen another bike since on my travels and of course I always look lol!
So, the seller decided he would use the frame and engine cases to turn his bike into a matching numbers machine (yes the thrown away LC was actually numbers matching!) and along the way sell the parts he didn’t want and I was there for some of those bits and bobs. Nice bloke and I’m sure he’s built a nice bike out of it but he’s dropped off the forums now it seems so who knows. I had hoped to have his old frame and we did a deal but I’ve not heard from him for a long time so assume that he sold it elsewhere sadly.
We chatted as I walked back to my car with my arms full of parts and at the end of his driveway I noticed his own pile of trash for the clear up. Sat on top of it was this bikini faring. He explained that the PO had cut down this nasty cheap LC2 GRP fairing and fitted it to the LC, painting it in maroon like the rest of the bike. It was left with only one angle bracket and the other fixings were ripped out, perhaps that damage occurred in the removal though. I asked if I he minded that I grab it and he laughed and asked why I would want it? However, anyone who knows me will know that I don’t like to see things for our bikes chucked out and figured I, or someone else, might find a use for it.
However, maybe he was onto something as in the last half a decade while it’s hung in my garage not one person has asked about it. Sure, it was ugly and broken and the paint was falling off, but I’d have thought someone might have taken a fancy to it as had they asked they could have taken it home. Those questions happened a lot with the OEM LC2 faring I had hanging there to be used on my LC2 build. Eventually, knowing how freebies seem to freak people out (or they never turn up to collect them), I even advertised it on the for sale pages of my website with a price that might spark a conversation with someone, but still there was zero interest... Until now!
...and that interest was: me! And again even for free I felt like I’d scored an own goal once I started working on it. I really don’t like old used GRP!
With the cracked screen off this is what I was left with:
First job was to add back in some of the fixings. It should be noted that I had no intention of ever using this panel on a bike so the fixings were really just for me to be able to hang this up when it was finished, so I used some Wurth epoxy to glue some bolts back in where the old ones had been pulled out.
Im not 100% sure how these fixings were used on the LC to be honest, but I figured if I had some places to bolt on some brackets I would at least have a chance of hanging this up when it was done.
The original remaining fixing only needed its rusty thread cleaned up and some glue to close down the split in the GRP where it was twisting out of the fitting when pressured.
And two new ones added in.
Those were initial photos, I later went back and filled the areas around them with more epoxy to ensure they would be fully bonded into the panel, not simply ‘glued on’
With the fixings done it was time to get rid of the awful maroon paint and then repair the gel coat cracks and the missing chunks. It really looks like this panel has had quite a life! Marron over silver (maybe its the base of the maroon?), over duck egg blue which was on top of the white gel coat. The blue was probably the most endearing, being Gulf like, but not for me...
Time to grind out the damaged Gel Coat. It seems the ‘arms’ that run along the screen of all these GRP fairings crack as they are obviously too thin and are easily bent beyond what they can take, the GRP being quite brittle really. Gel coat is not hard to grind though but you can see why car and bike restorers hate this kind of bodywork, it makes you realise how much better plastic is as a material for fairings.
You can see here how cheaply/poorly this panel was made. In manufacturing the gel coat, which is applied like a thick paint, follows the contours of the mould and has flowed all the way into the headlight rim area as expected, however fibre glass sheet does not readily bend into sharp curves without being worked and left to its own devices will straighten back up and not reach into this kind of area. Really this mat should have been two pieces (rim and body) with GRP sheet for the main part and either a separate piece or loose fill pushed into the rim area. The upshot for this panel is that there is a sizable gap between the gel coat and the fibre. Gel coat is brittle and upon being given a smack it’s cracked in this area as there is no fibre to support it. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, I guess it wasn’t an awful job as I can see that it hadn’t been repaired before and as we know its lived a few lives before I got it!
And onto repairs. I used some of my favourite plastic repair product to fill in the cracks. This is a a 2 part epoxy so would add back in some strength even though this isn’t designed for GRP, rather than just use a filler like I did last time. I should say that I only used this as I don’t own any GRP resin and I was not only keeping this a budget build by using what I had handy but I also find it messy stuff to use and this Wurth Replast is the complete opposite being perfectly easy to use as it is applied with a simple ‘gun’ dispenser, goes where you want it and cures fast, even their slow set version sets up fast. Lovely stuff! When doing this work I decided to strengthen the rim that I would fill in the headlight adjuster holes. It’s not being used on a bike, so why not.
The rest of the paint was sanded off and then onto primer and paint:
Firstly some primer
Then some of the same white I used on the other art project (it’s a full fairing off an 85 on YPVS if you’ve not seen it) as I had half a can left over, no sense buying new when I have this handy...
Ive said this before but this paint is bizarre in that the gloss seems to drop out over the days after application. With a pretty flat application it will still reflect, but it’s much more satin than the advertised gloss. A problem for those thinking it’s a one shot deal, not for me as I will put on a gloss top coat.
I wet sanded back with 1200 and it was onto the next layer... I decided that as I had half a can of red left over from the other fairing I’d paint on the ‘decals’. These are meant to be budget art projects, buying the odd can of paint here ‘n there is acceptable but outlaying cash (and waiting for) stickers was never in the plan. Plus I got to have a go at doing this, so why not?!
This was the scheme I was going to try to follow, but the red-on-white version. I only had a poor quality photo of that colourway but both these give the lines to follow:
Laying out the lines, doing my best to get them straight and also level across the two sides. As usual a little extra time spent on this goes a long way to give a better finished result.
Masking up...
Paint goes on. I’d uncovered the upper line in this pic for the next colour so you can see how this is going to work
Next I re-masked and painted the lines. I actually started by using some matt black I had to use up. I know these are blue originally but I didn’t have any and this is art, not for a bike of course.
The problem was that the paint I used was a different brand and reacted by drying cracked. I gently removed as much of it as I could while it was still wet with some wax and grease remover (very gentle stuff but does work well to remove new paint) and then hit it with some metallic black from the back of my paint drawer, I think I repaired a KTM with it back in about 2010, eeek! Much more successful this time, but the worry was if all my cleaning up had ruined something else... Hmm...The acid test... Removing the masking...
A few little marks from where the cleaning up of the cracked black paint with copious W&G remover had allowed some black ‘juice’ to seep under the edges of the line tape where they cross each other, a place always hard to seal. I figured I could get this out fine with a gentle sand later and it was a small price to pay considering the paint issue i’d had.
The colours needed some time to fully dry out so in the meantime I decided to work on the screen. This was pretty dire and normally it’d go in the bin based on the splits and scratches alone. The problem is that I don’t have another LC2 screen lying around spare and who knows how well this panel would fit with an OEM unit anyway. So, I set about working on it. I cleaned it up, sanded back the wear on the underside from where the GRP had been touching it and vibrating some gouges into the perspex and also all the ‘over spray’ of superglue the PO used to stick not only the (now lost) trim down, but in his slap dash efforts where he got it all over the place, even at the front lower edge of the panel! It was probably on his fingers when holding the screen while gluing. Poor workmanship but easily fixed, just more time sanding and polishing.
FWIW I’ve tried lots of polishes and potions on screens over the years. T-Cut, ScratchX, Polywatch, Mothers and Meguires plastic and headlight (polishes and also kits) but the best has been my most recent find; Aldi’s headlight kit. This kit is apparently made in Germany and has some local approvals from testing, all nice to read but the main thing is that it has worked a charm on my Evo’s headlights as well as on screens and is a lot less work than the other products. You do still need to run through the sanding grits, but it’s surprising what you can achieve with a minimal sub $20 spend and some elbow grease.
With the main polishing and cleanup done I quickly masked it up and painted some satin black on the underside after using a lot of wax n grease remover to clean up the whole screen otherwise the paint wont stick (nor will the tape) to the polished areas as this polish obviously has some silicone in it.
It looks ok I think for what it is, but you can’t totally polish a turd of course – Jimmy Carr suggests you can roll it in glitter of course, but I digress. I was never going to be able to remove or fix the huge cracks or the pink colour (yes I did check and it’s right through the material). The kindest thing for those cracks is to bolt it back onto the panel as that will support it at least, but that would have to wait until the sanding, clear and more wet sanding and then compound and then polish work was done....
With the screen just needing a final polish once its fitted it was time to get back to the bikini fairing... Yes, more wet sanding... The sanding knocked back the heavy painted and raised areas near the taped edges, helping the colours blend into the background white layer more evenly. Then it was hit with coats of clear and left to dry.
Another wet sand and then a going over with compound and finally with polish gave me this (here being tested with the cleaned up screen after the repaired holes were redrilled in the fairing):
I then painted some black on the ‘dashboard’ area that sits under the screen as I’ve seen when people don’t do this that it looks funny, and of course Yam did it on their bikes so why not. After that all that was left was to mask up and paint the black on the inside (this was in direct response to feedback... there really were moans about the last garage art project that the insides were not painted! Lol). No pic of that, it’s just some boring black lol
And finally with sticker added and some polish and a coathanger repurposed as a hanger off the upper mounts, I have this in my rafters:
I do plan to fit a headlight to this, Im just trying to source the parts required. I have the headlight and some bezel / rim parts but not enough to put them all together yet.
So what do you think? Worth the effort or should I have just binned it?
