Step 1 - Dismantle

Well, I've got to have the bike parked for a little bit so to keep my mind off riding, I'm gonna tackle this project that I've wanted to do since I got the thing. Give it my own paint job so its 1 of a kind.

I've got a lot of ideas. No fully complete all around design mapped out yet so I'm jumping into this as I'm making things up.I'll be sketching and designing along the way, though. And making sure I commit to something before I start throwing paint down.

I've watched a series of videos on how to do custom paint jobs and learned a little about preparing the surfaces for paint and how the clear coating works and everything. My dad's done some painting before, nothing like this but at least has some experience with the tools, and that's REALLY handy.

I'm going to document what I'm doing the whole time so I can track what I'm doing and if anyone else wants to try to tackle this kind of thing maybe it can help them get started.

I'm looking forward to this project. I think it will be fun and definitely a learning experience.

I've got some before pics and a few of it taken apart.

The body panels come off real easy. The tank on the other hand was challenging. I had intended on driving the tank until it was empty , but didn't have a chance to do that so we got the tank off and then started letting the gas drip out from the place the hose connected to the underside of the tank. Turns out it goes through a filter and the gas pump for the fuel injection which is up inside the tank. After about 40 minutes or so we got tired of watching it drip and realized we had to take the bottom piece out anyway, we might as well try now so it drains faster.

So we started taking that off and removing the pump unit from the tank was like a Rubik's cube. You have to twist it and turn it just the right way to get it to come out of that hole. had the hole been about a half a centimeter wider, it would be been very easy.

The tail was also kinda challenging to get off because it didn't really want to bend the way it needed to to come off the back. I'm wondering it Im going to crack the paint tryign to get that back on. that's gonna be difficult I think.

Once that was off, the gas drained really fast, it now had a 3 inch hole instead of a pin hole.

Now the panels are off, so its surface prep time and sketch time to finalize the design choice.