Alright, so I was in a bad high side way back in June and the bike was in overall bad condition and I finally got around to getting her put back together and had some repairs to do on the rear fairing and figured I'd delete the grab bar while I was at it. This how-to is for people that are already going to repaint or willing to repaint their fairing.

Step 1, take grab bar and fairing off so you have just a fairing with open holes:



Step 2, find a decent piece of plastic that you can trace your holes onto. My right fairing was broke from my wreck so I just took a piece of it and stuck it over the holes and traced them out with a Sharpee:



Step 3, use whatever creative way you have to cut the plastic out. I used a dremel to just kind've cut wide and then used one of the sanding wheels like you would use a belt sander and trimmed it to size and test fitted them in the holes. Obviously there's going to be some gaps, but that is easily fixable in the next step.



Step 4, Take the plastic back out of the holes and tape some cardboard or something about 1/2 to 3/4 away across the back of the holes(inside of the fairing). Now you'll want to mix up some Plastic Weld and quickly smear it around the edges of the plastic and work the plastic into the hole. This is the reason you're going to want to not have the cardboard covering the entire hole. You want a gap so that you can reach up underneath to push against the plastic and the cardboard so that you can get the plastic at the right height and start smearing plastic weld into any gaps and all over the top. I made sure to have the plastic sticking up above the hole a little bit so I had some room for error and could sand down to the shape of the fairing. The first side was extremely messy because the gaps were slightly larger than when I did the second one.



Step 5, let the first application of plastic weld dry and then flip over and get a good amount into the gaps on the back to finish filling all the gaps. Toward the inside you'll definitely need more because the fairing thins a bit; I imagine it thins for where it goes over the mounts for the grab bar.



Step 6, Sand sand sand. I started off with the only sand paper I had which was like 180 grit. Do not try to shape with 180. What a PITA. I ended up running to autozone and getting a mixed pack of 40,80,100 grit and pack of 120 grit. And of course I still had 180 and 220 at the house. Definitely use the really gritty stuff to get the majority of the plastic weld sanded down and to start shaping the plastic pieces along with the fairing. Then step up to the next grit to start smoothing and keep shaping. Then just continue to step up in grit until you end up with a smooth finish and can barely tell that the plastic is there when you run your hands over it:




Step 7, once you've sanded everything down, Primer! I haven't had much time to really finish on the primer so there's some light spots and whatnot. You'll notice any imperfections when the primer is on there. I've got a spot here and there from other repairs that I need to do a little smoothing on but where I covered the holes it looks good:



Well that's what I've done so far, I'll get around to finishing it hopefully in the next week on a day off and get it painted so you can see it on the bike also. If y

 

Cool man. Will be doing this to my F3.
Cheers

 

looks good...PICS!!