Steps - 19, 20, 21 & 22

I'm gonna jam a few steps into on because they are quick. So step 19 was getting the paint in and fixing the black on the two pieces. That turned out to be really easy, two coats over that and it was done.

20 white stripes on tank - that was pretty quick and easy, actually.

21 clear - For this stage I decided that the make shift paint booth in the garage was not gonna be sufficient or safe. Clear coat is really, really, really nasty shit. I even spent another $200 on a full face gas mask so that no vapor could get to my face, or eyes in any way. And I'm glad I did. Fortunately, on the air force base is a full blown filtered professional paint booth that I could rent through my Dad. Nice benefit to having a retired Colonel as a Dad. So we went down there Saturday morning and set up. We got all the pieces set up and ready. Then we popped open then clear coat and it had settled...REALLY settled. There was this hockey puck of opaque stuff in the bottom that can of paint and when we started stirring it was obvious that was gonna take a while. So we chunked it up as much as we could and then started shaking vigorously for about 5 minutes and sure enough that mixed it right up.




The clear went on different than the paint. I was very light with it and I actually shoulda been a little heavier handed with it. I was worried about loading it up too much but its pretty sticky stuff. After the first coat I was a lot more direct with the spray. I actually could have put on another whole can of clear and I think I might actually go back and do more later on. In a few months or something, I was just too anxious to get it together and riding again right now.

22 assembly - So putting it back together took about 4 hours of work. And an hour of that alone was just the front fairing with the headlights. Getting that all back in and working was a bitch and totally a two person job. In fact another pair of hands might have been handy actually. So my dad and I worked from about 8 to midnight and got the tank, front and sides back on, and the front lights working.

In this shot you can see the intake LED's as running lights. they look really cool and they also work as turn signals in conjunction with the amber (legally required0 side turn signals. i really wish I didn't need the sides to be amber.

This shot is of the tiny little toggle swtich for the halo's. It's sahped like a skull and lights up when ON.

Then he went in and I was too excited to stop so I worked for a few more hours, until about 2:30am on the tail, undertail and seats... enough to get it so that I could see what it looked like when it was "done". And boy did that feel good. Seeing it done is just awesome after all this work.

Then on Monday, Dad and I kicked into the last bits at about 4pm. We just needed to rig the trunk key latch and connect the wiring tucked inside the tail nice and neat. I've got a great set of pictured instructions that I'll be posting to the forums for the undertail since those instructions are ridiculously useless. So we wrapped it up and poured in a few gallons of gas and she started right up. I took it for a quick spin around the block to make sure it stayed together. and even though it was like 40 degrees and windy I could have driven it all night long.