Getting all dressed up

The VFR was in need of some clothes and those old plastics were not going to do the job.

I had sold them anyway which surprised me but people really want original plastics no matter how grotty they might be.

New bodywork was needed and Ragged edge racing were to be my supplier. After a brief conversation with Spike, he had agreed to provide the fairings with the correct shade of blue added as a pigment to the fibreglass giving them a rugged, great finish right from the start.

Fitting the fairings is fairly straight forward. They are designed for an F J/K Rc24 so if you have one of those they are very straight forward but my FH was going to need some custom brackets to enable fitment of these fairings.
Most of the fasteners between the panels and some holding it on are Dzus fasteners. These are versatile, quick to remove and tidy. If you want to know how to fit them, I did a bit of a write up on the NSR250 MC28 build.
First to go on was the nose fairing. I wasn't planning on fitting mirrors so I would need to make some custom spacers to hold the nose fairing in the right place which the mirror bases used to do before.
For a bit of fun and some practice on the R-tech digital Tig 170 I decided to try and make these out of some thin aluminium tube and sheet.
The tube was cut to length (allowing for the added sheet), then two squares of sheet were cut out and re-profiled into circles with a hole in the centre to allow a bolt to pass through to make the little bits of tube into cups.
 Once these were done and the base of the tube was profiled flat; I had the job of welding them together.
Using a very low amperage I achieved this then ground back the bases till everything was tidy.
These are loads lighter than using bar (which I didn't have anyway) but realistically they will probably cut into the fibreglass so they will most likely be replaced with nylon bar at some stage. Nylon will be good for a light weight and more accommodating alternative.

Another bracket that was different on this fairing was the lower trailing edge which is much longer on the F J/K and needs supporting.
I made a new bracket by taking some stainless tube and cutting it to lenght.
The ends were first flattened then bent at 90 degrees in the direction required to realign the bracket.





I had removed the centre stand (it's a race bike after all!)so a new mounting location was picked, drilled and tapped to give somewhere for the bracket to bolt onto.
The other end of the bracket was then furnished with an M6 clip on captive nut so the fairing can be easily fit and removed.

The back end went on with a captive nut on the top of the subframe and an existing Dzus plate used on the bottom corner.
The subframe needs some beefing up to take the much more radically sloped (and seat cushion removing) race tail unit.
The back end has nothing supporting it at the moment as the plastic under tray which would have done so on the standard tail has been removed and wouldn't get very close to it anyway.
I might be tempted to add some support to the tail in the future to give it a little more strength during maneuvering around the paddock.

The screen is for an F G/H and came from Wemoto. The F J/K screen uses a small subfairing to fit and was not suitable so Wemoto very nicely exchanged it when I explained my problem.
I used M5 rubber well nuts and stainless dome head screws to fit this. The screen is under quite a bit of tension to fit causing one of the bottom two well nut to pop out which was disappointing. I would not bother to drill these if I was doing this again but a large penny washer and nut has saved it from looking bad lest for very close inspection.
The front mudguard was a bit of a pain to fit as I am running a CBR600 F3 front end. I ended up making small metal brackets to line up bolt holes and button head M6 screws and nuts. I will probably tweak this over time as I can't put much torque on these fasteners due to the brittle fiberglass and jell coat resulting is fasteners coming loose during racing.

ACU regulations stipulate that I must run a catch tank under the bike that can hold the coolant or sump contents in the event of the bike shitting its pants.
Spike offered one of his generic off the shelf fibreglass ones to try out. I initially intended to cut and fibreglass this in but I soon realised this might be simpler than I had first thought.
The fit looked very close during a mock up and with the fairing now fitted it didn't need much modifying in order to get it to fit really nicely.
The front tucks into the lower fairing which I bolted in place and backed up with a good dollop of glue on the inside (I have no plans to seperate them). The back end, after a fair bit of profiling to avoid the exhausts, was then bolted up using more m6 clip on captive nuts and dome head screws backed up with nylon washers.
The end look is very subtle yet completely effective.

A foam seat pad and number boards were hurriedly painted on to get the bike ready for Snetterton but a full paint job is just round the corner.

After a first test on the 200 circuit, some dzus fasteners clearly needed nylon washers to help keep the tension on them but otherwise the fit was great and doesn't she just look nice, well maybe with a matching tank...