Rear-fender-delete option

It was cold and raining all day, plus I had to put on my "Collector" license plate anyway, so finally got around to pulling off the ugly rear fender. Easy enough until I got it back together and the tailights/brakelights/flashers didn't work anymore....turned out to be just the fuse, I must have shorted a wire while I was under the seat.

 

looks awesome man!

 

I never really understood the issue with the rear fender/license plate holder on our VF500's ??

I don't mind mine....I even added an extra brake light to it.

 

looks great, thats a nice looking bike !

 

Looks good! I think about all I'm going to do with mine is trim the bottom to make the fender shorter. I need to worry more about it running, fist!

 

she's lookin good man.

 

I dunno, my thinking has always been that the big black square fender back there would be more at home on a moped! And yeah thanks for the compliments on the bike, it's pretty much just as I bought it last year, just washed and cleaned up a bit. Previous owner(s) took good care of it before me

 

Nice looking rear end! What'd you do, just cut it?

 

You could just cut it I guess, but I kept it in one piece in case I need it again (might be required for inspection or something...)

You have to remove the whole rear fender section, and just replace the part that holds the license plate. There is a guy on ebay selling "kits" for 25 bucks to do this, but I made mine in five minutes with a piece of metal I had lying around. His kit comes with instructions too, but I figured it out as I was taking it apart.

Remove seat
Remove tool box
Remove rear bodywork (two screws in front, top, two in back, underneath)
Remove one bolt holding rear fender, 10mm, bottom/back underneath where the toolbox was
Remove two bolts each side that hold fender/grab handle 10mm and 12mm
Drop entire rear fender section
Use two small nuts/bolts to bolt up the metal bracket you made (see picture below)
The other stuff in the "kit" is not needed, the spacers are unnecessary, you can bolt the grab bar etc back on without them
Replace everything the way you took it apart

I just need some small round reflectors to put on the bottom corners of the license plate, pretty sure there is supposed to be something reflective back there by law

Pics below of what has to come off (circled part in fiche image) and metal bracket you need to put back on

 

Oh that's the 500 right? Damn, it's got a much better rear end than the 86 750. Mine would definitely need more work to get it to look that good.