Building a GD427 Cobra Replica

Given the amount of time already spent on preparing the donor parts, I am a bit hesitant to just start spraying the POR15 onto them without a bit of experience. As my motorbike needed new exhausts and as such had to be disassembled anyway, I prepared a couple of parts of the bike for spraying.

First, with the help of an el cheapo gazebo, I created an improvised spray booth.

This worked much better than expected. After a bit of testing to get the viscosity of the chassis coat right and the spray gun adjusted, spraying the two bike parts was a quick job. The goal was to record the settings for the gun, the amount of solvent to use and, obviously, look at the end result.

The chassis coat, when sprayed, gives a unique finish, more matte than brushed. The breather is no luxury, this stuff is nasty.

The rest of the day was spent masking the jag parts. I’ll probably spent tomorrow completing the masking and re-assembling the bike, so I can get it out of the way (you can just see it behind the tent on the left)

I’m declaring the garage finished! While this is never the case, as there is always room for improvement, the major work is complete.

Here’s roughly how it looked before we started:

Here’s the best comparison I could find for the outside view. Apparently we did not take a picture once everything was done, odd.

This shows much better what it was all about:

Unable to set a good time-slot apart for the treatment of the donor parts, it needs like a 6 hours slot for all the painting and cleaning, but eager to do something, i started to do some chores on the chassis.

I started with putting all nuts and bolts from the chassis kit loosely in place. This is to see if i got them all, but also thinking that their destination is probably the best place to keep them instead of in a drawer somewhere.

Next up was getting some (more?) wax into the inside of the chassis. Finding a small enough applicator which would also fit the venturi attached to the compressor turned out impossible, so one throwaway aerosol it is then. An easy 15 minute job with nothing to show for. I needed some more…

Still somewhat hindered by the thought of not doing things in order for the build I instead created a storage place for the bottom plates of the car-lift.

While a useful end result, I realised I was just making up excuses and needed a ‘real job’, so, I decided to do the front-brake-pipe run. Here’s the end result:

Gave me good pair of sore thumbs. I can’t attach the p-clips to the chassis yet, as i want to use the same rivets as GD has been using, but I do not have such a rivet gun yet. I feel another tool purchase coming up next week

Enough said…