The Work - parte UN

So as I mentioned in the last post, there has been a load of work done in the last few months. I bought the bike in December of 2010/January 2011 and stripped the bike by March of 2011 and then let it sit until about July/August until I could wrap my head around it again. Since then, here's pretty much a nice detailed list of what I did to it...

STRIP DOWN:

Then, I cleaned, sanded, primed and painted the frame in a truck bed liner type of paint. Gives it a nice "shit kicker" texture to it and makes it seem pretty indestructible...

Next up, it just sat for a while. But then, starting around October/November, I kicked it into high gear again...

First thing I did was to bring everything into the living room. I had always wondered why people do this. I have a garage, I keep all my bikes and tools in the garage. Why would I want to build the bike in the living room? I have no idea...It doesn't make sense, it just works. I think it has to do something with the fact that with all my art up to this point, I have always liked propping it up somewhere and staring at it while I work on it. It gives you a nice total composition of the piece and you are able to tell how everything is working together. I feel like these type of "check ups" are more than necessary with this bike. Since I am building a lot of the parts by hand and ordering non-stock replacements for others, it's important to me to make sure that as I add and get things on the bike, they look good together. I keep saying this (in the back of my mind knowing it isn't true) but this bike is being built for form over function (not the other way around). So, the form needs to work. So, here are some more shots with the bike in the living room and working on the tank and the custom fiberglass tail section that couples with a 2010 Kawa Ninja ZX-6 tail light.

The beginning of the fiberglass work for the tail section:

Here you can see the ZX-5 tail light before I tinted it black (to match everything else and still function) with the early work on the fiberglass tail section

The newly re-hand-painted badges:

More sanding, bondo, sanding, bondo, sanding, bondo, sanding and primer...then bondo and sanding...

That's a decent stopping point for this section. In the next part of the work, you will see a lot more of the fiberglassing, painting, bondo, new parts, cleaned old parts, etc...