Custom Tail Fairing
Finally, with all the major functional and structural aspects taken care of, I thought I'd try to do something for the aesthetics of the bike. I don't mind the more "rugged" or "primitive" look of older bikes in general but to be honest the 1st gen EX is one damn ugly bike imo. The front looks much better naked, but I really wanted to address the tail in some way. So I decided to be ambitious and try my luck with modifying the tail fairing.
I had a few designs mocked up in photoshop that basically used the stock 2nd gen fairings, trimmed them a bit and added a nice solo tail cover.
I took some pics to work with in photoshop with and without the seat and fairing:
And here's the rough idea of what I wanted to chop off:
What I did was paper mached overtop of the original fairings and tried to play with the copy I made to get it to look how I wanted but it wasn't working anywhere near as well as I had hoped. With the tail trimmed, the curves didn't flow well and the fairing didn't wrap back in to the subframe, and I couldn't blend the side fairings nicely into a solo cowl.
So I decided to go another route and make something completely custom from scratch. This was quite a bit harder than what I had planned to do but this way I wasn't restricted by any of Kawi's ugly design
The method I decided to use was to make a frame out of wire mesh and build on top of that. I forgot to take pics from the beginning but basically I just grabbed my cutters and my mesh and started shaping. I tried to make as much of it as I could out of one piece but a lot of the curves were quite dificult to bend into the mesh. Here's what the solo cowl looked like with a thin layer of paper mache over it:
Had to cut the seat a bit to make that work:
A little piece added on for the side part of the fairing. You can see the wire mesh better here:
And both pieces joined together:
At this point I was pretty happy with the overall design and shape of the tail. I also learned a lot from this initial design and should've probably started from scratch at this point and redone it fixing my mistakes. Namely I would've used sheet metal for at least parts of it, and probably a softer wire mesh for other parts. I could've also put a lot more effort into making it clean and symmetrical but it's my first fibreglass project and I wasn't even sure how the whole thing would turn out and if it would even be useable so I didn't want to put too much work into getting the first run perfect.
Anyway, next I grabbed some bondo, or a LOT of bondo and started smoothing. An early stage mock-up:
And because bondo is messy and was drying very fast, here's it in the end:
I know, a lot of imperfections that are gonna show up in my final product but like I said, it was a trial run more than anything. Next, I intended to seal this piece and use it as a plug to make a mold. However in the spirit of cutting corners and because of a few other factors I ended up just making the part right from the plug. I got some advice to use duct tape covered in deodorant (same effect as vaseline but less messy and in a very convenient package) to keep my glass from sticking to it.
Started taping it up:
All ready for the fibreglass (minus the deodorant):
And a few hours of cursing and resin curing in 5 minutes because of the extreme heat later I ended up with this:
And mocked up:
Now it's still too thin, and as expected not a perfect piece but for what it was meant to be and the amount of work put into it I'm pretty pleased. I may well redo this piece later on but for now it's going to get a few more layers of glass and that's it.
Let me know what you guys think!