One of the front stays was fractured, so a replacement was bought from Draganfly. Amazing really that they have these ready to go, made in-house!
The front yard paintshop was reconstituted and the front stand and stays were sprayed up relatively easily. Next with the guard, I had to knock out the dents and bend things around a bit to realign it. This was well outside the realms of previous experience, so I had to scour around to find information on doing so. I found a thread on another forum on 'paintless dent repair' and it was quite inspirational. The author straightens up a really quite mangled BMW /2 mudguard using basic tools, a few webbing straps to put the metal under tension and 1,000 taps (and a set of earplugs). I used a ball-pein hammer, some large sockets, a large adjustable wrench (mostly used as a hammer) and an old heavy duty coir doormat to work against. The trick is to go slowly and use ten light taps wherever you initially think one heavy one might do!
https://advrider.com/f/threads/tap-tap- ... s.1387805/
After a couple of hours work, I got the mudguard back into a pretty satisfactory regular and symmetrical shape.
The back half of the mudguard was relatively unscathed, so I decided to repaint only the front half, and have a go at blending the old into the new. I did use some epoxy filler, but quite a minimal amount. The bike isn't (I don't think) in it's original paint but even so, it has been in use and shows some wear, so I want to retain some of that.
I wish I had some decent 'before' photos, but here is the result:
Really need to do something about the side stand…
A few questions:
- The clutch is quite heavy to operate, despite having a new cable and as I understand it, it should be quite light relative to other bikes of the period. I have the cover off and am looking at spring tension, but think I probably need to look at pushrod actuation?
- Is the folding kickstart a non-original item? Put on the new centre-stand a while back (one step forward), but now find that the kickstart lever fouls it when the stand is up; in other words, you can only kick the bike over, when its on the stand… (one step back!).