The RC46 story

Got black bits on your bike? Could they be blacker and less flaky? Well it's time to strip and repaint them as they make your bike look crap. As you can see my VFR was getting a bit flaky around the mirror stems (Just like every other Honda I have owned with this style mirrors. Seeing as I had a few bits of the NSR off for respray  I decided to do the same for the VFR's mirror stems in the same batch. I'll explain the process of dis-assembly followed by respray so you don't have to read everything if you don't need to. To disassemble the mirrors I took the mirror and arm off with the single hex bolt being careful not to loose the spacers inside and remembering the order. Then the two smaller hex bolts need to be removed, allowing the stem base to come off of the fairing. Finally detach the rubber anti vibration spacer from the back of the stem base and we are ready to sort that finish out. Prep for painting required me to lift off any loose paint, rem

I'm not a massive sticker fan as they tend to detract from the lines of the bike. This bike had quite a few Team Roberts LTD stickers all over her and although not terrible to look at, they didn't mean allot to me so had to go. I was worried that the old stickers might damage the paint work when I tried to remove them but was relieved to see them wrinkle up and slide off with a bit of pressure using a finger nail.  Not fancying tearing my nails off over this; I went about finding a soft scraper and settled on a paint rattle can lid. When held to make the bottom oval it becomes strong enough to chip away at the transfers without being so strong it scratched the paint work.  For the first couple I used WD40 to soften the adhesive but it didn't make allot of difference and seemed to make the scraper skip over the transfers so did the rest dry. After allot of scraping I used household polish to lift any residual glue by leaving it on there for 10 minutes then b

Pipe Dreams One down side of the mighty Viffer is that due to some boring laws, Honda had to muffle her voice rather more than I'd like. A new can is the obvious answer to this with the added bonus of additional ponies, maybe. Having recently looked at the exhaust system as a whole, I was also in the market for a new system as the old one looked a little suspect in some places. The cost of a system is not cheap. In addition to this I wanted stainless which would make it a bit more and it's for a V4 remember, so that is not going to be a cheap stainless steel octopus I was looking to buy. Well you might think that but as it happens a top individual posted up  a Motad stainless system for a VFR800 with no pictures or further description so with me as the only person daft enough to bid, I won it for £149. Bargain! As you probably expected, I went to my trusted motorcycle pats specialist; eBay. I was however in need of the end can bit and annoyingly other people had th