Replacement plastic bodywork for early sportsbikes can be expensive and often unobtainable, so repair is usually the answer. You know the feeling. You’ve tracked down the bike of your dreams – the bike you longed to own in 1989.
It’s not a million miles away from being clean and tidy, looks to be a fairly straight-forward resto and even the price is sensible. Sure, the bodywork’s a bit tatty but hey, you should be able to pick up some better panels easily enough. Right? Last time, We just talked about Repair A missing lug, Now we'll talk about Re-Attaching Broken Lug.
Fairing mounting brackets can get battered if a bike’s been down the road, which can mean snapped mounting brackets. Often these are too thin to weld, so use proper plastic bonding glue. Innotec Topfix is a two-pack adhesive that’s flexible when cured and can be drilled, tapped or sanded into shape. It uses a special applicator that mixes the two parts of the adhesive in the nozzle.
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| Clean the area where the new lug is to be cast back to bare plastic. We’ve used a grinder for the flat surface we’re using to demonstrate, but you’ll probably have to sand off paint by hand if the lug is in an awkward location. |
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| Spray the area with solvent cleaner and primer, and make a mould by wrapping thin card around one of the lugs on your panel. Hold it in place while filling it with two pack Topfix. Hold for five minutes until it starts to go off. |
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| After about an hour you can start to shape the new lug with the use of a grinder and 120 sanding sheet. The paper mould will have stuck to the pillar of Topfix, but will come off once you start shaping the lug. |
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| Final shaping is best completed by hand. It’s easy to take too much material off with a grinder. Offer the lug up to its location frequently and take a little bit off at a time. Overdo it and you’ll be back to square one. |