Reading the rebuild threads on here has got me really anxious to get my hands dirty like I once did. The Army is sending me to Belgium and my wife isn't going. Need something to keep me occupied. I really miss my Blackbird and have looked at some light rebuilds for sale over there. I just finished the VF1000 thread and love the CF wrap that hoplit used on some of the parts. I looked on ebay and found CF comes in some color combinations. One of the BB I am looking at has some road rash to the red plastic. I wonder if the red and black CF wrapped on all exterior plastic would look good. Might be too much CF or mess with the fit. Just thinking about it. Wrapping a helmet to match might look good. Not sure. Thought I would throw it out there for feedback. My 04 VFR800 is already en route. It is stock, so I have some standard mods already planned for it. The finish is Asphalt and perfect, so I hate to mess with it too much, but might. I plan to use it for daily commute. David
Hey Davjohns I have a little experience doing some carbon fibre wrap on the dash plastic on my 97VFR750 a number of years ago. If the wrap is the printed vinyl stuff that looks like carbon fiber then your chances of getting a reasonable job aren't too bad, but the vinyl is hard to shape around inside corners. I needed to use a fair bit of heat from a hair dryer, on low, in order to get it to from around the gauges, and it took a huge amount of time to do a small area. When using heat on the vinyl be sure not to stretch it too much or the pattern of the carbon fibre that is printed on the vinyl begins to look distorted. The up side is it might look really cool. The down side............ well I'm sure you can imagine that part. I have also seen some carbon fibre applique that looks very much like the real thing and feels like it too, but I would not even attempt to do a motorcycle panel, since the stuff is quite thick, hard to form, and brutally expensive. I fixed a car for a guy who had some of the thicker stuff applied to the hood of his Ford Mustang, and he said that an actual CF hood might have been cheaper. I think he said it was like $750 bucks by the time he had it installed. The hood however, did look really good once it was done, but I don't even want to know how long it would have taken to apply . If you have a lot of time on your hands and feel like giving it a try, I would go for the vinyl sheet that is printed to look like CF. Try a couple of test runs on something like a drinking glass to get used to how much heat you need to work the vinyl. I tried doing the side of a stainless mixing bowl first in order to get used to working the CF film and then did the instrument panel bezel.
