It was eleven months ago now that I pranged my orange 1976 GT750 – I wrote about that little adventure here. While I did get the bike tidied up and usable again, there was one item that I didn’t get around to dealing with before winter set in, which was the trim on the Vetter fairing. Before I knew it, the bike was safely tucked away in storage and out of reach till spring. Here it is many months later and at last we have a bit of (modestly) warm weather and I can finally get to it.
I previously wrote about Craig Vetter, his wife Carol and the Windjammer fairings their company made in the early 1970’s here. The Vetter family have continued to add Windjammer repair and service items to their web site, along with ‘how to’ documentation and short videos so it has become quite the one stop shop ! Last year I had ordered in new edging trim to replace the road rashed trim on my fairing. As you can possibly see in photo, the trim is plastic and has a metal U channel that clamps the edge of the ABS plastic fairing shell. It is held in place with glue and the Vetter’s sell a repair kit with everything you need to repair the edging on one fairing included.
All seemed well as I pulled off the old trim, and then shaped the new trim to the edge using a hot air gun . The warmed edge trim moulds quite easily and then as it cools, it holds its new shape making the whole process quite straight forward as can be seen to the left. It was all starting to look really good – naturally, this could not continue !
The glue appears to be a two part urethane adhesive of some kind and when I opened the container, to my dismay I found that after a year, although the catalyst seemed fine the resin had turned to jelly. I did try mixing up a couple of test batches, and while it kicked off, it just didn’t seem to have any ‘stick’ once it had set up. Clearly I needed some fresh glue.
I was fully prepared to have to buy more, as after the length of time I had had the kit sitting waiting to be installed, it was clearly my fault and no one else’s that it had gone ‘bad’. Imagine my surprise then when two things happened. After sending an email to the Vetter company email address explaining my problem I got a quick response on a weekend no less ! And secondly, that Carol offered to ship me out some fresh glue ASAP and at no charge ! Frankly you could have knocked me over with a feather as this just never happens to me.
As I said in my previous post – personal responses, cheerful advice and friendly service is a very precious thing in this day and age and I’m sure goes a long way to explaining why so many of these fairing and bag sets are still being used today. There are a lot of companies out there who could learn from the Vetter example.
So, with the fairing just about repaired, I think perhaps I may revisit the Boyer Bransden ignition that I really just installed on the orange GT750 as I have a new toy from Accent in Germany to play with ! The ELZ2Coil !