Saturday, May 07, 2011

Not Purdy, But Still Functional

These broken old saddlebags are a far cry from what I began with. No, they are not pretty but they are functional so should get the job done. My son had been experimenting with my camera and I had no idea what mode he had it set on, much less how to set it back where I had it. Inside the shop the view looked fine but when I went outside the view looked more like a blueprint, as you see in the pics below. My savvy wife fixed the mode setting so I will get another picture or two up.
Anyway, here are the saddlebags so far. I got tired of trying to get them perfect at this point and just want to get them mounted before the trip. A friend of mine will repaint them nicely at a later date. If not for all the dang pollen floating around in the air these would have come out better. One top was glass smooth but all the other pieces, akkk, had pollen particles in the finish.




                                           One of the tops drying after clear coating
                          This bag had a crack all the way around it. Can you see the repaired spot?
                 Here is a shot of the bag above with repaired area visible from inside. Solid now.
                                                A front view with the funky camera setting.
      Side view of same bag with top sitting on it. I'm still looking for the crack. Tape not taken off yet.

All in all I'm fairly happy with how they have turned out. This is the first time I've tried my hand at Ken Linders ABS cement plastic repair. It is time consuming at first but began going faster as I worked on the other bag with more prior damage. Hell, Rat Bastard wouldn't look right with spanking brand new looking bags anyway. There have been the headaches with redoing the repairs and multiple re sands and fixing blasted paint runs,wet sanding, priming and so forth. That being said, it's been a lot of fun as well.

3 comments:

Billy Jones said...

Looking good!

Kathleen Jennette said...

I would have no idea how to do this... but they do look great!

WooleyBugger said...

Thanks Billy

KT Did,
I appreciate that, it was aggravating fun. Weird huh. You could do this I bet.