12NOV06 Snow Day - Tupperware Removal Practice

Woke up to a light snowfall coating the lawn and making the streets wet, so no riding today.

Once I had some breakfast and really woke up (had been up all night doing work stuff), I decided to see how difficult it really is to remove the tupperware off Maria the RT motorcycle.

The process was actually quite straightforward and easy. It's 15 screws on each side fairing, I wrote down where I found long screws vice the more numerous short screws, and then carefully removed first the right-side fairing and then the left. The part I had most trouble with was removing the mirror housings, you have to knock them quite hard to get them to come off the mounting pins! But, no damage done, and I had both side panels and the belly pan off in less than an hour. It really does not take that long but I was going slow.

Maria, sans tupperware

While I had the fairings off, I ran a wire circuit off the battery and stashed it for now behind the right radio speaker housing. I played around with mounting a cigarette power plug up front but decided to hold off for now till I can a good mounting point and hardware.

The idea of putting the power plug up front had been, I thought, to provide a point for me to mount a voltmeter that plugs into a cigarette power adapter. Had it almost rigged up and then realized that since the power was hot all the time, this would mean I'd have to remove the voltmeter each time the motorcycle was parked and turned off or there'd be a very slow drain on the battery!



So I ended up bagging on that idea. I suppose one day I'll run a hot wire from perhaps the wire that powers the rear brake riding light which only comes on with the ignition and then I can have a voltmeter permanently hooked up for the motorcycle.

I also rigged up some wireties to function as security lines for the mirrors in case they come off while riding, apparently its happened to other RT riders. Now they'll stay with the motorcycle even when knocked off and instead bang against the fairing! I think, that's the least costly of possible scenarios.

The fairings went back on easy enough, again I had some trouble with getting the mirrors to go back onto their mounting pins but in the end I got them on. Good drill, cleaned up parts of the motorcycle I could not get at before, built up some confidence about being able to access my motorcycle when learning to do my own motorcycle wrenching in the future.