how to turn a nerf side cover into an asphalt one

The individual picture on the left is a "before" I fiberglassed the cover. the picture on the right is the "after" actually i re made the drivers side one after it de laminated and the right one just needs a some more sanding and a bondo smoothing. after it was fiberglassed it felt, looked and kinda smelled like asphalt. the weird thing is its really strong but pretty flexible. i put it on the bike and the top conformed to the sides. drivers side will get glassed tomorrow and sanded on Saturday. should have them finished and installed by Monday

side covers made by nerf

so I'm fiberglassing my side covers right now. they have been splashed with resin/hardner mixture and are sitting out side drying now. good thing to know. if the resin/hardner mixture is mixed a certain way it generates it own heat. and alot of it. instead of covering them with glass mat i just wrapped them in this carpet and coated them. i'll bring them in in the morning and see if they are even any good. i torched my lungs, burnt my fingers and have resin on my arm hair... but it beats the shit out of spending 50 bucks per side for a set of new ones at the junk yard...
cheers




update; 7/7: after letting them dry all last night and this morning after lunch at work i started checking them out. turns out the resin/hardener or the 110+ heat caused the mat to seperate from the aluminum. it still hardened but a good thress inches from the original form. it only did it on one of the covers. one turned out damn near perfect.i'll post a picture tonight. i have already sanded it and will bondo it in the morning.

Ghetto Fab-ulous

a few months ago i made some side covers and planned to fiberglass them... turns out i don't know shit about fiberglass. in my attempt to learn to fiberglass i ruined my forms. I had long gotten rid of my templates for them and had to start from scratch and make some new ones. I took some paper thin aluminum to reform new side covers. now i'll either retry my hand at fiberglassing or ask a friend at work to do it for me. heres what the right side looks like. hence the title "Ghetto Fab-ulous"

finally, something went my way today.

In previous iterations, i was using a glowing skull as a brake light, you know the kind people use as hitch covers on trucks. a few weeks ago it finally gave up, the mounting screws wallered out and it was too much of a pain in the ass to keep using it. so i went to pep boys and got an honest to goodness taillight. granted it was for a trailer. I just got done wiring it up and it looks better than the skull ever could have. more of a classic bobber look that ultimately i wanted. still got to tie up the wiring and adjust the brake light switch to work when the pedal is only partially depressed but its 110 degrees and i don't have any air conditioning in the garage.

new tank, new direction

After my original gas tank came down from the orbit the contained explosion put it in I quickly realized that worrying about silly shit like a dent in the tank was only going to cost me more money. I searched ebay and found a replacement tank for about 20 bucks, worked out an awesome deal through work for damn near free shipping and started out to make the rattiest rat bike the world has ever seen. This time around i sanded the tank by hand through the clear coat and shot with with about 6 coats of Krylon. then turned my attention to the stance. This Blog is titled Low Life because that is the direction I am sticking with on this bike. Low, loud and unrefined. Kinda like me :) I'm going to skip through the steps I went through to get the bike this far but i'll some it up with a short statement. alot of cutting, drilling, fabbing and welding was needed to take Hondas original design for a low buck street cruiser and make it into this little nightmare.

But here it is now. 6 months later its a shell of its original self. And I'm only 1/2 done.



I'm only really able to work on this bike at nights and on weekend free time. I should have named this "Project flip flops" cuz i'm always wearing sandals when I work on this. I know its not safe but its 110 fuckin degrees in my garage now and I only work on it for 15 minutes at a time. cheers.

Step 1 of 100

The design went through several iterations. Its not like American Chopper where the design is fully thought out before anything else is done. instead, I just started doing what I felt like on the bike. the first thought was to sand the paint down to bare metal, repaint in a metallic finish to make the bike almost look like a delorean, mid way through that i realized that wouldn't fit me so I tried to sand off the wet paint, it left it with a very cool hammered and beaten finish in the metal, so I ran with it and made the bike look like an old hammered army bike.


The bikes design stayed like that for a few weeks until i decided to redo the tank with fresh coat of paint. there was a dent the size of someones palm on the right side of the tank when i bought it and i wanted a fresh start with no dents. I took the tank in to work where I have access to all kinds of tools and various danger. One of my co- workers offered to help me remove the dent. he took the torch and heated up the area. what he forgot to do was check the tank to make sure I cleaned it enough... as the picture below illustrates I didn't clean it out very well at all.

So it was off to buy a new tank

Catching up

it had been so long since i added something to this blog that i forgot i had it. heres the deal 6 months in...


In Late Decmeber I bought a 1981 Honda Gl500 Silverwing off Craigs list for $400.00. I wanted a motorcycle for a long time and since I lack the ability to shit spare change my options were limited. When I found this on Craigs list I knew it was the bike for me. Price was right, size was right and it was so ugly and beaten what ever I did to it I wouldn't feel bad. Below is a picture of the bike a few days before I took delivery