Having done the front callipers I was starting to struggle for things to do as I was waiting on bits in the post. As such I decided to turn my attention to the bodywork and cosmetic side of things. Whilst this is (as I have to keep reminding myself) going to be a track toy, it can still look as tidy as I can make it with what I have laying around in my garage…..and I am a tart who likes shiny stuff.
All the fibreglass fairings along with the best front mudguard I could find were dragged out from under the bench and treated to a good sanding in preparation for some rattle can action.
I even started to play around with the nose cone and a spare set of light covers to see if I could replicate the race nose cone look…
However having done this it just didn’t sit flush enough for me so I took them off again and had to set about filling and sanding the holes I had just drilled (Dohhh!)
The tank I am using for this build always had a few small dents in it, but that never mattered as “it was just a track bike”. However with a bit of time on my hands, and some filler in the garage I decided to dress it up a bit before it got the rattle can treatment.
Having dressed out the worst of the dinks, it was washed of and give a coat of primer.
Not perfect, but not bad and a lot better than it was before.
Having done the tank I moved onto prepping and priming a few other bits of the fairings. Because I knew how the front mudguard was going to end up (and didn’t need any further tweaking to fit) I could take that from rubbed down..
through primer stage….
to paint then stickers and finally clear coat.
I originally started to think about either doing the bike in either really wacky (lot of neon colours) or some sort of replica period race scheme.
Again the sanity check was needed as I could quite easily replicate a simple race scheme with rattle cans,....but then I would then be shelling out 60-70 quid for stickers to match the scheme ….and this is meant to be a CHEAP build.
I had showed the Mrs a few schemes I was thinking of and she picked up on a basic black and white one saying “That one is classy”! Maybe not the most ‘funky’ but when it comes to questions of style and taste, I defer to my better half so black and white it is. This also worked out well with the principle of this build as I had a few rattle cans of black, white and silver laying around in the garage. As a real bonus it turned out the black paint I had “laying around” in the garage was actually a really nice metallic paint, which might not show up in the pictures, but looks really good in real life so if I can get the rest of the paint to go on as nice as it went on the mudguard, it will look really good.
Got a few days away with work this week so hopefully by the time I get back all my spares will be here and I can crack on properly with the build, and the rest of the cosmetics, next weekend