After nearly three years riding to work the same way, imagine my surprise when, turning into a corner a bit too quick, I finally got my knee down!
My knee was, sadly, followed by my hip, my shoulder and my head, as I lay down on the side of the road for a rest. A work colleague stopped to give me a lift and, noticing that my right arm was refusing to move more than a few degrees from my side, suggested that I drop in to the local hospital to get it checked out. A mere 8 hours later it was determined that I had a small but well-placed fracture at the top of my humerus.
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| Ow, my arm! |
The scooter, meanwhile, was mechanically sound but badly scratched down the whole right side. I would have been able to ride it, were I still able to ride.
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| Ow, my scooter! |
So there I was with about three months before I would be fit to ride, and a bunch of repairs to be done. I decided to take advantage of this
crisitunity by not only fixing the existing paint, but going for a full respray.
I started by removing all the panels.
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| All panels removed |
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| Naked scooter |
When doing a big disassembly like this, it's important to take pictures of each part you pull off, and bring a supply of little bags or containers to keep all the screws and fasteners you remove. I went with zip-lock sandwich bags, writing the name of each piece on the bag in texta.
The first job is to remove any badges or stickers, then sand down each panel until it is smooth. Some of the bigger scratches and cracks needed a bit of body filler, which also needs to be sanded once dry. That done, I laid down a couple of coats of primer, sanding smooth again after each coat.
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| Primer coat complete |
Once the primer was done, I started on the colour coat. I wanted a really bright yellow, to stand out better on the road, so I got a couple of cans of Nissan Signal Yellow, which looked nice and bright on the sample, but turned out to be more of a lemon colour when applied.
Next I found a colour called Vivid Yellow, which looked great, but when I used up the cans I had, I was informed that the colour had been discontinued about two years ago! Finally I settled on
Ford Yellow Glow, which was close to what I wanted and easy to find in large quantities.
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| Colour coat complete |
The colour coat took much longer than the primer, every time I sanded there would be another high spot that rubbed through to show grey underneath. I also have to thank Ylana for her patience with all the yellow drips that ended up on the laundry floor while doing the wet sanding!
When everything was evenly coated, I moved to the clear coat, which got a final sand and then a cut and polish. With the panels looking nice and shiny they were ready for reassembly.
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| Clear coat and polish complete |
As well as repainting the bodywork, I sprayed the "S1" badges and the rear luggage rack with matte black, to make them stand out against the yellow.
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| Finished scooter |
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| Looking good in the sun |
While I got into this project through a pretty unfortunate accident, I'm really happy with the finished result. It looks very bright and eye-catching now and, as far as I know, I now have the only yellow S1 in the world!
