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| First step in all this is to remove your front and rear seat. Nothing too hard, you'll have to lift the rear side edge of the front seat to gain access to the rear mounting screws. | Here is what you'll get once you remove all the plastic. There are some fun plastic pop
rivets on the bottom of the tail that your bound to have fun removing. Just be careful as they are easy to
destroy. Once you get the feel for how they come out they are no longer a problem.
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| Once you have removed all the plastic, now comes the painful...no turning back now part. Cutting off the stock fender and some of the lower
shield. This shows you about where you want to make your cut. Best Idea is to mark your point in the sides and start in from each side. The kit will cover the cut across from the bottom so if there is alittle wave to your line don't worry. Only time the cut is seen is when the rear seat is up. What I did was cut off the fender section shown below first. Then cut out a bunch of the shield
in-between the frame. Then I started going across to make the final cut using a small hand saw blade. I tried a dremel but found it too clumsy in the tight area I needed to work in. AND COVER YOUR EXHAUST CAN WITH A SHIRT OR RAG, UNLESS YOU LIKE HAVING SAW MARKS ON IT. Ask me how I know this one.
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I used the ribs in the lower shield to line up my cut. They are used to give the hooks (which will be cut off) some stiffness. | |
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| Here is a big chunk of what your going to be cutting off....can you say weight savings? | ||
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| In the mean time you will be trying to put together the SHARP metal bits that make up the kit. On my kit, being one of the 1st few sold, there were a few problems with things not fitting. Above I highlighted the area I needed to file away to get the stock turn signal backing plate to fit onto the new mounts. There is a metal piece on your stock lights that has two holes on it, kinda a teardrop shape. One one side the holes have a flange to them that would go through the stock plastic bracket. Two problems came up when I got to this point. 1st off was that the holes on the new metal turn signal bracket were drilled too far apart. The stock backing plate would not fit into the new bracket with out cutting some of the edge away, as highlighted in red in the left picture above. For this I used a rat tail file and went to work slowly on each hole until the plate fit. Once that was done the 2nd problem showed up. Since the stock turn signal bracket was part of the plastic fender, it was much thicker than the new metal one. The lip on the backing plate was set to go the depth of the thicker plastic. When you mount everything up it will all be loose because the lip will contact the turn signal arm before it's tightened to the metal bracket. How I got past this was to get some washers and cut an edge off them so they would not interfere with the other hole that the wire run through as shown above in the right picture. You can see the cut washers and a set already installed on the one side. One nice feature of this kit is it allows you to mount the brackets so that the turn signals will be in 1/2" each or at the stock setting. I opted to mount the bracket to allow the signals to be in more towards the bike. But as you can see above that the mounting hardware for the signal arm now is kind of in the way of the newly mounted key hole, but you get used to it in time. | ||
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| Once you've hacked and wrestled everything into place on the Kit (have fun with those rubber grommets), and figured out how to mount the locking mechanism and key cylinder, it's time to install the kit. One tip though on the lock clip is to bend it so it applies more pressure due to the metal again being thinner than the stock plastic, other wise it will slide off leaving you lock hanging there. Everything bolts up pretty easy. The problem I had was getting the plastic back onto the bike. As you pull the tail down over the frame and over the kit, the sharp edges scratched the lip of the tail. No big deal, can only be seen if your looking at the underside of the tail. Just figured I'd put a warning out there to take your time and watch the edges other wise you'll have a matching set of cuts in your tail. Other problem you'll run into is getting all the wires for the tail light and turn signals to now fit in the slightly smaller space behind the lock. You don't loose too much of your trunk in this mod but you will lose a little. Here are before and after pics of the trunk area. You can now see how much the kit replaces and how the locking is set up to be keyed from the bottom. | ||
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| Stock Fender
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CW Fender
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| The side with everything put back together......looks much cleaner now. | And a view from below showing how everything sits and where the keyhole is now mounted. | |
