In an earlier post I had mentioned the challenges of finding someone to do the paint on Project FZR, particularly given the banged-up nature of some of the fairings, in particular the top fairing.
My earlier chats with repair places hadn’t filled me with confidence, and I had put the whole idea on pause to enjoy the summer sunshine and think about what to do next.
It was on one of these sunny days that I did something impulsive, but that ended up being quite wonderful – bought another bike.
I’d been not hugely enjoying my 2017 Kawasaki Z900 as a life choice. While it was great fun as a big, powerful, naked fun bike, having no fairing made it pretty suboptimal in rubbish weather, and not great for highway cruising either. It also lacked a certain rawness, and as bizarre as it is to say, it just didn’t light my fire in the way that riding the FZR did. That said though, I had no plans to make the FZR a daily rider once I had finished with it. I had been watching a few bikes online, and one caught my eye as being something out of the ordinary, representative of its time, a fun, cheap commuter, and the perfect stablemate for the FZR – a 1994 YZF600 (a.k.a. the FZR600R for those in Europe or the USA). I’ll leave off talking about that bike for another time, other than to say that it needed some minor work fixing broken fairing tabs, so once again I needed someone who worked on bikes to fix these minor problems before I started using the ’94 as my new daily ride.
I thought I’d try searching again online, and given this was a much simpler job, see if I could find someone local, with the vague thought that they might be a potential repairer for the bigger job. I found someone near my work who at least mentioned motorbikes on their website – Benjamin Crash Repairs – gave them a call and they confirmed that they could do some plasti-welding for me, so I went in for a chat.
Every now and then the universe lobs a win in your lap, and this connection was one of those days. Chatting with the owner about fixing up the broken tabs, it turns out that he used to make race fairings for motorbikes, and would be very happy to have a look at the plastic on the FZR.
Another visit back with the bike for him to have a proper look, and he confirmed that most of the job wouldn’t be a problem, and that he could do the whole spray job minus the tank (which we decided to leave as-is given that it was in good condition anyway) for under a grand. I’d need to get the decals put on elsewhere, but he knew a business nearby who could do that for me too.
Sorted.
There was one slight hitch however – the top fairing. Among its cracks it had one along the thinnest part of the plastic, where the mirror bolts on. His advice was that this wasn’t something he’d touch, as given the weakness of the area, the fact that a mirror would bolt on to it and the level of vibration it would take, there was a very high chance that it would break again if he did repair it, so a new top fairing was needed.
I mentioned earlier about twin-headlight versions of the bike over here being rare, and even worldwide finding good second-hand top fairings is hard. It tends to be a regular question for new people to the Facebook FZR forums – ‘is anyone selling a twin headlight upper fairing?’, which usually gets a response along the line of suggesting that they might as well be searching for chicken lips or rocking horse poop.
A quick search of eBay as I wrote this turned up two worldwide, both in the USA, both around this quality (which is even worse than the one I already have) and taking into account our weak Aussie dollar would end up being over $300. Not an option.
At the end of the day, the only feasible plan beyond bare-ass luck to find someone wrecking one with a usable top fairing was to go for an aftermarket one. There are at least two places that sell them – Airtech in the USA and Perfect Fairings in Greece (which I didn’t know about until after I’d gone Airtech). Not cheap, but at least I’d know that I was getting something which would bolt straight on, that was structurally sound, and that would need nothing more than a light sand before it would be ready to paint.
With a spray painter now lined up, summer coming to an end, a spare motor ready to bolt straight in and a plan in my Trello board it was time to take the bike off the road and get down to the real business.
Next up: Let’s do this thing!