Makeover time!
After some time away, Mark’s K2 is back for some cosmetic surgery…
This time I want to start looking at cosmetic items such as trim and paint on the CB750K2. For the USA, the K2 was available in a choice of Briar Brown Metallic Custom, Flake Sunrise Orange or Candy Gold Custom. In my opinion at least, the most attractive colour was orange and it was a pity that was not an option for the UK market where most bikes were gold. Mine, however, was brown and this is not a colour which I would choose though I must admit it does not look too bad if it is in good condition, clean and shiny – which mine was not. It would need a respray, but first there were a few things I needed to sort out. One is shown in Photo 1. Cracks like this are commonly seen in plastic side-panels and they are caused by ignorance on the part of previous owners. Not knowing any better, people naturally grab hold of the most accessible part of the panel, which happens to be near the top, and pull hard to yank it off. You are meant to carefully release the lower mounting then equally carefully pull the top two in turn, and do the reverse to fit the panel. There are a number of ways to repair this sort of damage and I think most restorers would turn to plastic welding. I decided to use a technique which worked perfectly well when I repaired the crash damage to my Hornet seat cowling and does not need any special tools. Last time I knew that the plastic was ABS so I bought a sheet of ABS, cut some little pieces and glued them on to the crack to hold it together. This time though, I had no idea what the panel material was but it occurred to me that it does not matter what it is as I am merely gluing bits of plastic to it – so I just used the same technique and materials as before. Naturally, you need to prepare the surface of the panel to provide a good so-called key for the adhesive to bond, and I found that rubbing down with a mediumgrade wet-and-dry was perfectly adequate. Do I need to say, by the way, that this is on the inside surface where the repair does not show? The adhesive I use which works well for this application is Loctite 3090 (Photo 2). It is a sort of two-part superglue which comes with a set of special nozzles which act to mix the parts in the correct proportions very thoroughly and quickly. This is very convenient and the adhesive sets rapidly and makes a strong joint. The only downside is the price. You can only use a nozzle once so of course it makes sense to have everything ready to go before you start gluing. It seemed likely that it would make a stronger joint if I chamfered the broken edges a bit like welding thick material (Photo 3) as that would maximise the
The someone in question had also been rather generous with the amount of glue and it took some work with a wood chisel (Photo 9) to get the worst bits off before I could even start rubbing down. There are only three parts (two panels and the fuel tank) on a K2 that are the paint colour as all the other non-engine parts are either black or chrome. The fuel tank was in pretty good shape externally, with no dents or rust so very little was needed to prepare it for painting. There was some rust inside though and I shall look at what to do about that soon. So now I was ready for the paint. Although I do try to do all the work on bikes myself, I wanted the main painted areas to be as good as possible and this would need to be done by a professional. I use Tony at Cycle Sprays, who always produces a brilliant result. The first point about this was that there is no such thing as a tin of Flake Sunrise Orange paint, or if there is I suspect it will be a poor reproduction of the original. The reason is that the look is created by applying multiple layers of different paints, and I needed to research how it is achieved. The point is that we don’t need to know how Honda produced the finish as not only have paints changed over the years, but the actual Honda colours were not completely consistent. So instead we want to know how a reliable representation can be simulated by using what is available now. Tony had not produced this colour before and had no information about how to create it, but after a little research (the paint codes used by Honda were LV and R-2C-F, by the way) I came across a ‘recipe’ which sounded feasible, and that is what Tony used. It used products from House of Kolor, a Us-based company which produces an incredible range of custom (sorry, I mean Kustom – every C in the literature is spelled as a K) paints. If you take a look at their website you will see all sorts of amazing ideas and possibilities for projects. Next time we’ll see how the colour was simulated.