Carbon Fiber Bodywork

Maybe I was talkin to you Josh :laugh: To answer your question though, the change of the bodywork to carbon does change the direction a little. Now I think that I'll try for a more traditional scheme on the tank with a pearl white and metallic burgundy, and pearl white trim on the sidecivers and tail over the carbon fiber. At least that's where I'm leaning now.

I was working on the right sidecover yesterday, and I forgot how incompatable ABS plastic is with acetone! I needed to repair a notch hacked into the side of the cover, and I've been using spot putty to slowely fill it in. I was making the last application of spot putty when some of the separated liquid component of the spot putty squirted out of the tube and onto the face of the sidecover. Not wanting to have the nice, shiny surface of the sidecover damaged, I grabbed a rag with some acetone and wiped it off. It wiped off all right, but the rag had some black on it?? Now I have rag wipe marks on the face of the sidecover that I have to fix The kicker is I KNEW what would happen, and I just didn't remember it until I saw the rag :blush: Oh well, it's nothing that can't be fixed! I'm excited to see how my spray gun will work with the gelcoat, and to employ the lessons I learned on the first mold.
Mold making materials arrive on Friday :woohoo:

in the immortal words of homer simpson,
"DOHH"

leon

I bet you don't spill any more nail polish remover on your bodywork from now on. Sometimes the hard learned lessons are the best learned.

Otto, this sounds really nice. So when you going to break yours out and get her finished to ride??? I have been waiting to ride all summer with you. I have put quite a few miles on my bike already. That ride around Lake Michigan was awesome.
Sorry to jack your thread but just hearing that beast, yeah, it's evil. I love it.
otakar wrote:

I myself am partial to the KZ1300 sound. For obvious reasons.

Yes, that looks great! Now, I don't know if you already explained but I read most of this thread and have been following it. Why didn't you make the covers with the tabs as original style?
How much time does it take to make a set of those with a tail fin? I am desparately interested in the whole process. Would love a nice looking set of those on my beast.
Thanks for sharing.

An excellent question Saxjon, and one that I did not directly answer. The short answer is complexity and availability. I picked up a used set of aftermarket bolt on covers for cheap, but the bottom line is that to make the tabs I would need to make a two piece mold, and even then that would only give me the flat tabs, the push pins.....I don't even know how to incorporate them in carbon as a one peice part. I'm definately not saying it can't be done, just that I can't do it :laugh: For simplicity, I used the Maier covers. For my purposes, I ultimately wanted to us 1/4 turn fasteners for the sidecovers, so that helped me to choose the maier pieces to copy.

As far as the time required, do you mean to make the molds, or to make the carbon fiber parts? To make the molds takes WAY more time than the laminate. It takes me about 2 hours to make one sidecover. Thats prep, layup and strip. I expect the tail to take a little longer to prep and strip. If anyone has questions about what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, feel free to ask.

Thanks to a generous deposit by another member, I recieved the materials I need to make the molds for the right sidecover and tail....among other possibilities I also got some peel ply, whic seriously looks like the same heavy duty polyester fabric I can buy at any fabric store. I'll use it in a new layup for the left cover and see if I can cure one of my laminating issues.

Tooling gelcoat, modeling clay, chopped strand mat, lightweight fiberglass cloth and surfacing wax. The surfacing wax is an additive that is mixed into the gelcoat at the same rate as the MEKP catalyst and it provides a tack free surface after the glecoat cures. Gelcoat that is cured exposed to the atmosphere has a tacky finish. This provides a chemical adhesion for subsequent coats of resin, but is undesirable for the finish coat on a mold that is going to be handled. That was a long winded FYI :ohmy:

I FINALLY got the right sidecover prepped. The biggest problem I had was getting wild with the 3" buffing wheel I had mounted on a mandrel in a 90 deg die grinder. I would either nick the sidecover with the mandrel or the buffing compound would dry out and I'd get little burn marks in the plastic. Either way, I kept having to go back and fix my mistakes until I learned to slow down a little more.

You can see the drip mark, filled in by the primer that was left by the spot putty compound.... :blush:

When I did the left sidecover, I glued strips of file folder paper to the back of the sidecover to make a flange. The 2 problems I had was 1: the glue I used didn't work very well, so I had to be extra carefull and 2: I didn't make my flange NEARLY large enough. In fact, I had to make the flange bigger after the fact and even then, I wish I had more room. So here I used expanding foam as the glue for the card stock and sidecover.

I just sprayed a bead around the perimeter of the sidecover, and started cutting out pieces of paper to fit where I wanted it
(you can see where I was learning to write my name on the folder..)

From the top, the starter flange looks like this

From the bottom it looks like this

Now these are just starter flanges. Once the foam glue dries, I'll glue extensions onto them and blend the curves together. Once thats dry, I'll use no drying modeling clay (I used kids clay before, not the rigth stuff) to fill in and smooth the small gap around the edge of the cover and the edges where the paper overlaps. My goal is to make EVERYTHING as smooth as I can reasonably make it before I spray it with PVA and start laying up the mold.