"Nooooooooooooooooo!"

Ooooooooops!


Mat responded to my suggestion of sticking vast swathes of fluorescent material across Shadowfax's nose (under the blog title "Conspicuality" earlier this month) with some horror; "Nooooooooooo..."(this goes on for some lines)"...ooooooooo", all across my Facebook.

Matt visited today and witnessed the dexterity and efficiency of my mechanical abilities installing the new rear cowl, which arrived mid-week - along with 1m x 30cm of fluorescent snot-green sticky backed reflective tape. Ooops. Sorry, Mat. Too late, I've started and so I'll finish.

Shadowfax's new bling

The cowl wasn't too difficult to fit once I'd consulted the ST1300 bible and doesn't look too "Policey" at all. Cutting brown-paper templates for the conspicuality sticky was harder though, especially in a stiff breeze. (No tracing paper in the house - the kids have eaten it and we don't do Izal). The templates and cutting for the mirrors went okay but the more complicated nose of the cowl went horribly wrong so I sacked it for a time of more daylight; difficult given tomorrow's the Shortest Day.

The newly fitted conspicuous rear cowl

I also re-fitted the LHS front cowling; the whole fairing has been seriously out of alignment since buying Shadowfax and having removed the RHS cowl to fit our wonderful HID headlamp kit I was confident of making a good repair, which proved quite straight forward. The result is a much improved cosmetic appearance, which should also prevent the odd feeling of lob-sidedness caused by the cowl's displacement of my left foot.

The repaired fairing - the black under cowl was 2cm free of the white and the white was 2cm free of the bike! Now neat and tidy

All in all a good day for catching up on some maintenance as well as gossip. Mat remains unsold on the conspicuality thing but he relented to my logic if not execution of hi-viz and kindly donated a fully-armed fluorescent over-jacket for those murky mornings and dark nights. (Cheers, Mat). Now, what was that about not looking too "Policey"?

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