Exhaust wrap…sets off the cafe racer quite well so I thought I would have a go at it. Turned out not so bad actually. I went for the pale coloured wrap thinking that there’s enough dark colour on the bike as it is. I watched a couple of tutorials on YouTube which recommended soaking the wrap in water before applying it which is where I started. A word of warning though…exhaust wrap is made of fibre glass so best not to wear shorts and have it trailing across your bare thighs! Itchy doesn’t come close!
Getting the collets in correctly first time around would have helped this task! Much wiggling and manoeuvring managed to get it on okay; having an extra pair of hands helps greatly.
Gutsibits provided me with a lovely shiny polished surround that comes with 6 LED’s. I originally got the pre-drilled surround but the holes were 70mm on centre apart rather than the 60mm needed for my V50, so I sent it back and got the undrilled version. Obviously this meant that I would be drilling this £140 piece of billet…gulp!…still I had the experience of doing similar to the rearsets so a friend of the family allowed us to use his pillar drill and super bits that drilled the holes beautifully.
The clocks were a little ratty looking so a bit of primer and some more Satin Black and lacquer and they look almost new.
As I was replacing the original filament bulbs for LED’s there was quite a bit of snipping off large spade connectors and swapping them for mini spade connectors.
The LED’s have what looked to be mini spade connectors but are actually ‘solder tags’. Being a highly un-proficient solder-er I wondered if some mini spades might fit which they did but they are not a tight enough fit so will have to be chopped off again and soldered! I think a thin piece of card between the ‘solder tag’ and the plastic body at the bottom of the LED will prevent me from melting it!
So the soldering iron will be coming out next week with a bucket of hope also!
So after the re-doing of this bit of wiring I shall solder next week and then it will be a case of sorting the throttle twist grip out so as to stop the cables moving excessively. Then, with a bit more wiring, I hope that within the next 6 – 8 weeks we can be adding fluids and try and fire it up for the first time! Stay tuned…
