first time making anything with fiberglass.
I used 3M polyester resin that you can get from autozone etc. it's says it's good for making boat hauls so it should be good enough for me.

they came out much better than I was hoping for. the durability seem great. they do not make a cracking noise when they are bent like almost all fiberglass sets I've painted such as sharkskins, armor bodies and godfather.


the black marker lines are from the outlines of the fabric. I tried to cut them to shape but that was too hard. so I just laid it in the mold in squares and had to cut the holes out when it dried.








the opening looks goofy because it's not cut out fully yet.



and all of my sets. the upper in the foreground is getting headlight openings cut out for the street.




here's the finished product.

Man, if that's your first time trying the molding thing, BRAVO! Just curious, how many layers did you lay up? I don't know crap about bikes so bear with me. The parts have nice symmetry but are they thick enough for you? I know you want them somewhat flexible but I imagine their are some tradeoffs with thinner parts.
Again, great job.

Holly hell, those look professional. I wouldnt even know where to start if i was gonna make fairings for my bike.... Nicely done...
In the end how much did you think they cost to make, im sure you saved a butt load over shark skins and similar brands

darrel, I went with 3 layers of weaved cloth fiberglass. it's a lot thinner than the strand matting material. and way easier to use and get the air pockets out. it's also supposed to be stronger for it's size than the strand stuff.

they are plenty thick enough. actually almost too thick.
next time I'm going with 2 except at mounting points and structural edges to cut the weight down.

tnxm,

the initial investement was more than what I could have bought a cheap set off ebay etc.

a full set of sharkskins and companies alike such as armor bodies or catalyst composites would run you over $900.
don't get me wrong, they are very top notch work though.
and now I completely understand why they cost as much as they do.

I only spent about $300 making the mold and the parts.
but that $300 is everything, body filler, resin, fiberglass cloth, an primer.
and all the other small stuff, brushes etc.

now that I have a mold, I hope I can sell some of these. maybe make some extra cash.

although I've posted them for sale on several motorcycle forums, it generated a **** load of pm's and emails. until I posted my asking price. LOL
at first I said $140 each and everyone though I ment for the whole set..LOL
people on motorcycle forums just don't understand or get why bodywork and paint jobs cost so much.
I get guys asking me to paint stuff for them but run when I tell them how much.
they act like picky customers when it comes to buying parts that have to be of utmost best names out there. they often have close to $3k in aftermarket race parts (even on a street bike) but spray paint thier bike instead of getting a good $300 paint job using automotive grade paint.


they just take too much effort and time to sell them any less. plus they look better. have a better quality primer with a better finish. and in my opinion are much better than some of cheap sets I've seen such as pit-eck and cheetah.

I've got about 50 hours in these things too. people just don't realize what it takes. sure I could roughly cut them out sand the edge real quick and slap on a runny pin hole filled $3 primer job, but they would pick the **** out of them and call them junk etc.

so I take the time to make them perfect. and no one wants to buy them. I will not just leave them like crap. because as soon as I do, I will have someone wanting money back or acting like a **** on a forum and talk bad about me and my work.

hell I've even seen guys complain about how a set they bough didn't have any mounting holes drilled out.

well that because as soon as you do that, it's almost guaranteed they will be wrong. not even the $900 sets come drilled.
guys with motorcycles are some of the worst customers you will come in contact with.

they want the expensive stuff for cheap and get mad when the cheap stuff isn't as good as the expensive stuff. you can't win with 90% of them.

Ohh your preaching to the choir, man im on a few motorcycle forums. Some of the people started seeing some of my painting/repairing on fairings and they wanted me to do work on there stuff. So i would quote them prices and they thought i was smoking crack. They said they could do it for a quarter of that. Of course my reply was i use quality paints/primers, i sand and prep right, and i fix all my mistakes, so if you want to save some cash go for it. of course about a week later i would get a PM "hey what did i do wrong, why did this happen" so on and so forth. I would answer i dont really know i dont use salvation army paint on my stuff... $300 for a full bike paint is nothing compared to the $1,200 full system exhust they have on their 98 gsxr... Grr sorry i had to vernt..... Cant wait too see these bad boys painted what kinda scheme you gonna go with?

Wow, and I thought kit car guys were jerk wads! I think with you guys it's still that, "Aw man, it's just a bike, how much paint could that take?" And trust me, I don't care if it's cars or bikes, your average joe consumer wouldn't know a good well fitting part from a warped, delaming piece of crap UNTIL they had to fit and finish a part.
I feel your pain gentlemen, don't let it kill your hobby though.

tnxm wrote:$300 for a full bike paint is nothing compared to the $1,200 full system exhust they have on their 98 gsxr... Grr sorry i had to vernt..... Cant wait too see these bad boys painted what kinda scheme you gonna go with?

exactly. they will not think twice about a exhaust system that might give them another 2 hp at the most. but cringe at $300 for paint? ok, go spend that much for an exhaust when you don't/can't win races or are one of the slowest riders at a trackday. on top of that put a $15 paint job on your $9k bike that makes it look like wrecked pos.


I'm not creative one single bit. I just don't know. I thought about the tank and the upper 1/2 blue and fade into a pearl or metalic white with the word Yamaha in the same blue as the top on the lower that is white.

I've always just went with a single color before.
it's getting old. I thought about doing the bottom in black but my buddy who is buying this set from me wants the lower in black.

I said no that's my color pick another one

thought I'd throw up the finished pics after I painted them.



and the set that is for the street that I cut out the headlight openings.

How do you make a mold?

I, too, can vouch for the "thriftieness" of bikers. They don't like spending money on paint work b/c of the eBay chinese people that sell those cheap **** abs fairings for $400. It makes it tough to sell $600-750 paint jobs (my price). Also, people let their oem fairings go so cheap sometimes it hurts us.

man when i first started with the sportbikes quite a few years back before the custom sportbike boom happend i went through all the same stuff you are talking about. people think they can get their car painted for 300 at maaco so a bike should run 150. funny thing is as time went on and more guys were customizing their sportbikes the average customer became more amd more educated. you still have a ton of people out there that just dont know but things have gotten better. when i first started i rememeber it being difficult to sell an 800-1500 job and 1500 was for some nice graphics and mild airbrush. even at that i was probabaly making 10 bucks an hour doing it but it was for fun and to get my name out there a bit. these days with how popular the custom scene a low end job is 2500 and high end 6-7g and i dont usually have too much problem selling that to people. the thing is you need to be in the right crowd. most motorcycle forums, guys looking on ebay, people who want race or fiberglass fairings or racers are NOT your customers. these people are usually just trying to get their bike back together as cheap as possible or if they are race guys then they are only interested in performance parts. these people are not interested in custom bikes at all so they dont know what goes into good work or have no idea what it cost nor do they care.

serpentracer, nice job on the fairings btw. i have made some custom fairings and undertails over the years that i still have the molds for so i know what goes into them. the fiberglass fairing thing imo is tough. pretty much because you are going to be selling to the type of people i mentioned and like sportbikepainter mentioned you have the cheap china stuff to compete with. only way to make it work for you i think is to make custom fairings like the tail i made for popular bikes like gsxrs and especially busas. fairings that completely change the look of the bike. although while you can get quite a bit more for them they also are much more time consuming to make because you cant just layup a mold off an already made fairing. there is quite a bit of sculpting that you need to do. that tail i made has about a gazillion hours in it. anyway here are some pics of a few items i did. this is all about 4-5 years ago. i actually started making undertails back when hotbodies first started out. i did a couple models. my big claim to fame was that they all had the tag molded into the tail. i quit making them......what was i thinking. look at hotbodies racing now!!