Art School

All the really cool skills I have I learned in art school. People say art school is useless, but if you go to the right kind of art school (the kind where you spend a lot more time buying supplies at Ace Hardware than Dick Blick) you'd be amazed how many problems you can solve.

We bought this motorcycle on Craigslist a few years back. It was a salvage job and had a rough life before we got it, which I made a lot worse by putting in my novice miles on it. I dropped it three times - always while trying to park, or get out of a parking spot - and each time the fairings got a bit worse.

Then another of our intrepid household put in her novice miles on it, and dropped it a few more times (always on the opposite side I did...funny) and the fairings got a lot worse. Some were even lost, never to be seen again. It was time for this bike to see some love, but there was no way I was going to shell out $500 for a new set of fairings for a chop-job bike that is probably going to get beat up by the next n00b who gets their mitts on it.

See above comments about art school, resourcefulness, and my deep, abiding love of 2 part epoxy resins. First:

Second:

Third:

And one more:

In this one, you can really see how bad the damage was. I was able to recreate entire sections by making a waste form out of crumpled brown paper, then layering pieces of fiberglass to make a strong backbone. The surfaces weren't great, so I used Bondo to smooth them, primer, and paint. The colors are pretty close, though the Rustoleum red is a little darker than Honda red...but there was no budget for little $40 cans of colormatched paint in this project. The bike looks better than it ever has since it came to live with us, anyway!