Ongoing work

It has been a while since I blogged as I have been using the bike through last year. The bike has proved to be mechanically very good and returns well over 50 mpg. I put this down to the new throttle body rubbers and the very careful balancing of them. During August I took the 22 year old bike on the autoroute to see what she will do. Watching the GPS I wound her up to 145mph (232kmh) and held her there for a good ten minutes, I then pulled into the services to give here a look over and see if anything had fallen off/broken. Not a thing.

She has lived in the garage over the wettest part of the winter and while there was polished and checked regularly. I decided to remove the seat and rear plastic parts to see what sort of condition the back of the frame was in. After a very simple job and about 12 bolts later, I could see the rust showing through parts of the paint. They were rubbed down to bare metal as in the next photo.

At this stage I had considered using some phosphate to protect the bare metal before painting, but the corrosion had come off very well and I was using a paint that did not need that much preparation.

Out came the pot of smooth Hammerite paint that I had bought in the UK and a 20mm paint brush. Hammerite is great in that it goes onto bare metal, leaves no brush marks, dries within 3 hours and ends up very glossy and very hard.

Note the finish in this picture with the reflection on the bottom corner of the finished job:

The plastic mudguards which fit around the wheel were also well faded and looked grey rather than black. I tried a few different solvents to see if I could bring them back to the original colour without success. I ended up rubbing them down with 4000 grade Micromesh abrasive, followed by 8000 grade then rubbing compound and finally wax polish, the results are great.