I got Camilla back on the road. Not sure if I’m going to rename her yet. This is my first attempt at a new blog post using WordPress instead of blogger, so we’ll see how it goes.
For starters, I haven’t done the tank or chin fairing repaint yet, and I just won a front fender off ebay, so that’s not installed yet either. All that said, here she is:
And from the other side:
I think the bbq paint (high temp stuff) on the cans turned out pretty well. The plan is to do the chin fairing and tank in truck bedliner, but that’ll be some time after we get moved. At this point, I’m just glad to be back on the road again. Biggest issue I had by far in the whole setup was getting the brakes to line up and play nice. The picture below shows where I had to separate the brake caliper halves and grind them so they’d clear the rotor edge (small arrow), and where the 4mm spacer sits which gets the caliper aligned relative to the plane of the rotor.
The turn signals were really kind of an afterthought, since they’re just on there to keep the bike legal. Most people don’t notice bikes anyway, so I always ride assuming they’re all trying to kill me. As long as they’re not 4-legged forest rats, that’s worked out pretty well thus far. The mirrors offer a pretty good view in the adjacent lanes and behind the bike, which is actually an improvement over the stock ones. I did have a bit of a problem with the upper fairing screws backing out, so I’m going to have to figure out how to secure the top of the fairing. (Can you say zip-ties? I knew you could kids!)
There really isn’t a pocket of still air to ride in behind the windscreen anymore, since there isn’t really a windscreen. I will have to make the fender work (forks are wider than a stock GSXR, so I may have to ‘adapt’), because the front tire throws water up on the headlight w/o one installed. Of course she sounds much, much better having gone back to the pipes which are sans baffles. To wit:
Or on YouTube here:
Leave a Reply