Next on the ‘to do’ list – the belly pan. I picked this one up from Milton with a couple of other damaged parts, it’s in better shape than the one I had but the same mount tab on the left is broken! The guy that gave me it said he thought he had the tab so I got on with installing the number plates before I did the repair in the hope that he would find it and get in touch.
I have found that the best way to remove old stickers is to carefully use a heat gun. I tried to save the original Honda stickers at first but they were quite thin and got stretched during removal.
I never heard back about the tab so I found some small metal plates in the garage that already had the sides bent over like the top edge of the belly pan so I cut a corner off one and deburred it to use to repair the mount tab. I decided to try some quick drying JB Weld to bond the plate to the belly pan so it would look nice and clean from the outside. I sanded and cleaned the plastic belly pan and then clamped the plate on with vise grips and left for several hours.
Looks like a good job to me 
Nice and clean
Then I laid it on the bench to tap it with the centre punch for drilling the hole … and first little tap, it pinged off!! Thought about trying again but figured it would be better with some sort of positive locating feature, so I went and bought some black zip-ties and went with the old dirt bike style zip-tie stitches.
Nice and strong, plenty of room around the mount hole 
Came out neat, that will do 
Let’s offer it up … 
… sweet!
I hadn’t been looking forward to it but had to get on with the lock-wiring. Drilled all the holes first, I’m using 0.032″ wire so the recommended drill bit is 1/16″. I started with the 4 pinch bolts in the forks, that was tough as I blew through 15 drill bits!! Fortunately it went pretty smooth after that and I only used another 4 or 5 to do all the other holes. I looked at lock-wire spinny pliers online but they seemed a bit expensive to me so I thought I might as well try 3D printing something. I looked up a couple of wire twister drill attachments but they were really suitable so I designed, drew up in CAD and then printed this little gadget.
Finally I needed to sort out a catch can since I’m using a stock belly pan rather than a race pan that can hold some oil. After wandering around the house and garage I finally found a couple of tubs of compressor oil that were about the right size and shape. They were both open so I emptied one into the other and cut the lid off so I could get the hoses in and then zip-tied it to the mount hole where the stand used to be. I like the fact that the zip-tie goes through the handle so it can’t slide off rearwards.
I found a couple of bolts to use on the seat, zip-tied the transponder mount to the forks, zip-tied some little regulator thing up front to the upper fairing bracket, re-routed and zip-tied the vent hoses and I think that’s about it, ready to race!!
