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ed29
0
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2007
- Messages
- 5,174
- Reaction score
- 17
- Location
- Terlingua Tx
- First Name
- Ed
- Last Name
- Hegarty
For the last few years the old KLR has been wearing desert tan flat camo paint. Seemed like a perfect match to its environment. One thing about the flat paint though, it looked worn and dirty soon after being applied. Add in a few 'beauty marks' from light to heavy contact with desert plants and rocks and the old bike was looking pretty ragged.
Since it is still in decent mechanical shape after all these years I decided to give it a coat of paint. I chose some rattle can heavy equipment paint in John Deere Green. The catalyst for getting me off my duff and actually doing it came when I purchased some used Touratech panniers here on TWT to replace my lost Moto-Tech boxes.
Rehab began of course with stripping the body which uncovered a failure in the stock rack system. The bolts which hold the rack and both inner and outer fender had stripped some time back. Kawasaki seems to have used butter instead of steel for their captive frame nuts. The Pack Mule has inserts in most of them today. Having repaired the threads before now these particular two separated from the little steel straps that suspend them from the subframe. Essentially these were floating under the strapping above the tube so they weren't going anywhere, but they weren't easy to remove. As soon as I released the torque the nuts just spun. You can't get to them until the fenders and rack are off, and they hold those components in place. I have some long bolts coming off the web along with locknuts. The plan is to drill through the frame tube and have the nuts accessible from under the fender.
Here is how the paintwork is coming...
And here are the new racks to mount the panniers...
The task for today is to clean up the boxes a bit. They have from damage from prior use that could stand to be hammered out. I will be stripping the decals too. Not because I don't like them, but because I have to swap which is left and which is right. They used to live on a GS, muffler left bike. One is wider for the off side and one is narrower for the muffler side. KLR is of course a right muffler bike and the off side rack rides closer to the center of the bike. So what was a left box is now a right box and what was back is now front. Red refeictive tape on the front of the panniers just seems wrong.
Since it is still in decent mechanical shape after all these years I decided to give it a coat of paint. I chose some rattle can heavy equipment paint in John Deere Green. The catalyst for getting me off my duff and actually doing it came when I purchased some used Touratech panniers here on TWT to replace my lost Moto-Tech boxes.
Rehab began of course with stripping the body which uncovered a failure in the stock rack system. The bolts which hold the rack and both inner and outer fender had stripped some time back. Kawasaki seems to have used butter instead of steel for their captive frame nuts. The Pack Mule has inserts in most of them today. Having repaired the threads before now these particular two separated from the little steel straps that suspend them from the subframe. Essentially these were floating under the strapping above the tube so they weren't going anywhere, but they weren't easy to remove. As soon as I released the torque the nuts just spun. You can't get to them until the fenders and rack are off, and they hold those components in place. I have some long bolts coming off the web along with locknuts. The plan is to drill through the frame tube and have the nuts accessible from under the fender.
Here is how the paintwork is coming...
And here are the new racks to mount the panniers...
The task for today is to clean up the boxes a bit. They have from damage from prior use that could stand to be hammered out. I will be stripping the decals too. Not because I don't like them, but because I have to swap which is left and which is right. They used to live on a GS, muffler left bike. One is wider for the off side and one is narrower for the muffler side. KLR is of course a right muffler bike and the off side rack rides closer to the center of the bike. So what was a left box is now a right box and what was back is now front. Red refeictive tape on the front of the panniers just seems wrong.
