Fruit 'n' barley's poor bike was in a sorry state. We had to try and track down a set of fairings and most importantly we had the engine to sort out, would it repair or was a new unit required. After a couple of days of head scratching and chatting to people in the know it was decided that the engine was too badly damaged to try and repair, it would have required welding on the damaged crank case, which potentially would have been a leaky nightmare, but more importantly it was hard to tell if any deep seated damage occurred due to the generator end of the crank sustaining a nasty smack.
It took a little while to track down a suitable donor engine. A call to every breakers yard in the local area proved to be fruitless, but eventually we managed to source a low mile unit in Scotland.
Money paid, engine delivered, time to put our mechanics hats on.
The fit was a little fiddly but fairly enjoyable but the grin on Fruit 'n' Barley's face when the bike fired up was worth all the scraped knuckles and sore knees.
Our search for fairing panels was far more difficult than for the motor, F'n'B's ZX6 is an unusual colour (yellow and purple/black) and consequently anything that turned up on fleabay was quickly snapped up for top dollar.
While searching on fleabay we spotted a couple of Far East traders selling full fairing kits, ready painted, for reasonable money. We carefully scrutinised their feedback,which was all good, and decided that we could take the risk (Paypal has plenty of safeguards in place). F'n'B ordered the Kawasaki Moto GP replica fairings and in the meantime we tried to persuade the poor lad to use his
bike as normal until his shiny placcy bike bits arrived.He was not overly keen on this idea but a planned weekend blast around the North Yorks moors soon had
him scrabbling for his bike keys.
I think the little run done wonders for his confidence and once again he was a happy boy.
Next time : time to fit those fairings...
Bungle
2 comments:
Cool! When I dropped my 'bird and had a side panel away being sprayed, I was reluctant to ride mine because I assumed everyone would think I was a tosser for dropping it. Mind you, all my mates KNEW I was a tosser for dropping it whilst stationary, so what strangers thought was pretty small in the scheme of things.
Good to see a bike back on the road.
yeah I always think that you assume you're the only person thats dropped a bike before and therefore go on the defensive and try to pretend the last owner dropped it.
as for the bike being back on the road, erm......stay tuned.....ha ha
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