how to get a mirror finish out of your motorcycle fairings is coming up next okay ladies and gent this is part of my rod rehab project on the Ninja 650 that I’m rebuilding I have sprayed and clear coated the lower half of the fairings that used to be the matte finish so they’ll match the OEM black that I ordered to go on the bike so if you want to learn how to paint and clear coat you’re on the pharynx check out the link above now what I’ve done here is went ahead and did a little bit of a sanding and just barely buffed it by hand so you can see the difference between the orange peel from using the aerosol cans to what the finished product is gonna be like now there is a little bit of fine scratches still in it I just did this real quick by hand so you can see the dramatic difference of where we start and what we’re going to end up with huge difference it’s going to look great maybe you bought some fairings from an aftermarket vendor that were poorly painted or maybe they packaged them before the paint was fully hardened and the clear coat and you want to smooth them out so what you want to do is get a good selection of sandpaper I have 1500 2000 and 2500 grit I’m gonna start off with the 1500 now when I did this corner here I hit it really quickly with the 15 then went to the 2000 did a little bit of compound a little bit of polish and that was it took me about five minutes just to do this one little corner by hand now when I do the finish polish on the whole deal I’ll use my handheld orbiter which will speed the process up immensely but to get started I’m gonna cut this down with 1500 now I have three coats of clear on this so I have a good working surface I’m not worried about burning through it going into the paint now you want to stay away from the edge is try to just stay in the meat of the fairings when you get close to a corner what’s going to happen is the paper tends to burn through a little bit quicker on the sharp edges now I also have a few little pieces of foam that I’ve cut because fairings have a lot of curves to them it’s not like doing Auto Body surface and I’ll wrap these little foam pads with my sanding paper and that will give me a block that will take the shape of the curves it’ll help me out that way using a bare hand you run the risk of leaving ridges where your fingers lay on the paper but let’s get started to it so we’re gonna take take my paper here and just kind of wrap it around just like that this is my small block I have a bucket of slightly soapy water just a couple drops of soap anytime you do wet sanding you want to use a little bit of soap it breaks the surface tension and helps the particles float away and makes the paper last longer to having that little bit of lubrication so what I’m gonna do here is just lightly go back and forth and again don’t put a lot of pressure and try to keep a distance off of the off of the corners in the edges you don’t want to burn through that clear coat try to work on one area at a time and I know some of you’re gonna say man off of God this is nerve wracking because you’re going from a glossy finish and then you’re gonna haze it up and it is quite a bit of work to get it out to get it shining again if you were to paint your own set of fairings top to bottom and not just trim pieces like I have you might be perfectly fine with the way it turns out slap the whole set on your bike and you’re done but for me I order the OEM replacements and I want to try to match those to r6 fairings
the best I can and you can see the little bit of cloudiness in the water here we’ll try to get this whole section and show you what the outcome looks like all right let’s see what that looks like so we’re starting to get a nice smooth finish and that’s what we want you can see little speckles here and there that’s the places that we need to go back and hit so not that bad so I’m going to go back and touch up these little these are the low spots this is where there was a bend and a bit of a scratch in the plastic I bought this one used so you can see how we’re starting to get uniformed look there and don’t use too much pressure just go over it lightly let the block flav flat you want to let everything lay as flat as possible you can see how smooth the surface is going to be so I’m going to move up to here now not really wanting to do circles just kind of working the paper around letting it do its thing all right so I’m going to go over this whole faring with 1500 and then we’ll come back and take a look at it once it’s dry all right I’ve got the lower half sanded it’s dried off so now we can go back and look for any little bright speckles that spots that still need a little bit more sanded out now I’m not really concerned about the underside this is underneath the bike it will not be visible as will most of the lower part of this actually you can see some bright speckles right there and a little bit along the top and then going right to the tip need to sand this area through here just a little bit more I was trying to be easy because this is a sharp edge it’s a corner it will cut through much faster than a flat surface but running my hand over it baby smooth all right so what we’ll do now I’m not too concerned with writing the center sections here i smoothed them over just enough I already did this end over here so I didn’t worry about rescinding that so I’ll do right around here actually close to all my edges is where I need to hit a little bit more try to use my thumb as a guide on this lip so I don’t get right on the edge and once I get it fairly close and flat again we’re gonna go back over it with a mm and once you start going as fine as 2,000 grit on your paper you’re pretty much getting into the territory of polishing so right now we’re cutting the clear coat now the factory paint does have a little bit of texture to it so I don’t need perfection on this this is not a show bike this is just a restoration if you start seeing the color of your paint on your paper you’ve went through the clear coat I’m not of course I have a thick coat on here so I’m gonna finish this up dry it off and then we’re gonna look at the results let’s see if we’re ready to go to our next paper all right let’s look at it this is the 1500 there’s a few little color speckles bright spots here and there nothing to really be concerned about like I said I’m trying to match the factory so I’m gonna leave just a little bit of texture in the paint here and there but for the most part it’s smoothed over nice and when we hit it with the mm that’s going to further smooth out some of these little random spots and they won’t hardly show up at all so I’m going to change over to yamaha r1 fairings my paper and start the whole process over again now for mm and like I said earlier this is getting borderline onto polishing a surface basically what this is gonna do is flatten out the scratches that 1500 left and the surface begins to get smoother and smoother and if you really had bad texturing you could go and start with a 1000 and really cut down quickly I don’t like to remove clear coating that fast from the previous items that I’m painted especially being a beginner I would rather do a little bit more elbow work and get it down gradually than all at once and then realize I just cut into the paint okay I’m gonna go rinse this off and see where we’re at we’re probably ready to compound and polish there we are this is finished up with 2,000 grit surface looks pretty good pretty smooth there’s still a few little speckles here and there again not real concerned about it so now we’re gonna move up to the compounding now there’s many different products on the market that you can use there’s professional-grade stuff but for me what I’ve used in the past especially on the tank of the bike was Meguiar’s ultimate compound along with my six inch orbital now earlier when we started
the video I showed you little section I’d done by hand now this stuff compounded really fast by hand so with the polisher may be too aggressive I may have to cut back and go by hand we’ll see we’re gonna put just a few dabs on fired up man this thing has a terribly short cord so I’m gonna polish it on my end and then I’ll flip it around and show you guys when you see it starting to dry we’re gonna throw a little bit more on there and I can already see a gloss coming back and you want to make sure r1 fairings you free of any random debris you don’t want to put scratches back in what you just sand it out some of this I know I’m gonna have to go back and definitely do by hand because the plastic is bouncing all over the place just letting it gently glide around not really putting the pressure on it it’s kind of hard to do that with plastic anyway okay that’s why piss off and see where we’re at now this is a microfiber cloth and you can see the gloss starting to come back starting to look really good so we just need to do some more buffing on it so I’m going to do that and then we’ll come back and look at the next set of results okay there we go this is nothing but this is compounding is basically finished at this point I hit it two times over with the orbital and then went in and got by hand into the all the little cracks and crevices here so now what we’re going to do is start our polish and see what it turns out like now what this polish is going to do I use the ultimate polish go along with the ultimate compound they’re both like ten dollars a bottle but this will remove all of these little fine scratches and put that gloss finish on it now this will not be a wax I just painted these so I have to wait almost a month before I can wax everything but it already looks I mean if if I wanted to that could be a finished product it would look like the fairings were ten years old because it’s going on ten-year-old bike but all the other fairings brand-new so we won’t try to get as me scratches out as possible let’s see what she ends up looking like probably should have gotten a different terry cloth here not too bad McGuire’s compound and polish did the trick a little bit of elbow grease on the sanding part everything pretty much buffed out really nice with the handheld orbiter there’s a few little spots that need to go back and touch up in the cracks and crevices right here and then back here behind the bottles where the little vents are but no big deal I’ll touch those up when I do this next fairing but other than that not too bad here’s a before and after shot but just remember 1500 grit 2,000 grit and motorcycle fairings then we went straight to the compound and then polish and turned out nice but thanks for watching guys if you have any questions or comments please leave them below if you enjoyed this video learn something please hit that like and subscribe until next time ride safe you