Rode my bike into a ditch yesterday exiting a hairpin on a back-road. A few metal scratches, radiator repair, and damage to the left fairing. Can someone share experiences on repairing, or at least securing, large cracks in the SH plastic? Probably a temporary fix.
Depressed on Sunday,
Dutch

 

Plastic weld from devcon. You should be able to find it at large national chain type home supply stores or maybe walmart. It's a two part chemical process that is mixed together like JB Weld and quickly applied.

Use a dremel to rough out a small trench in the crack on the BACKSIDE of the plastic and lay in the plastic weld as well as smoothing it out along the nearby area. If the panel is still nice on the front side (i.e., you're not repainting), make very sure to clean any seepage off the paint. This stuff has a very short working time (approx 4 min) so be prepared, have cleaning agents (mineral spirits), towels, etc nearby. Be careful of getting any on your fingers as you will leave a permenant fingerprint on anything else you touch! BTDT.

This stuff is real tough. I tried to break a weld and the test panel broke at another location. You can sand it. You have to real careful about getting a even surface and not taking away too much of the softer surrounding plastic.

The only downside I've found is it doesn't work as well on some other types of plastics.

 

You can buy a plastic welding kit from Harbor Freight for about 30 bucks and fix it permanently.

 

You ever try using one of those plastic welding kits from Harbor Freight jschmidt?

~Jeffers

 

Yep.

 

Thanks for the info! I'm about ready to start putting things together again.

 

try this stuff out!

http://plastex.home.att.net/

it's a breakthrough product in plastic welding/repair. saw these guys first at the big bike show in toronto (based out of reno, NV). super easy to use. basically comes with a powder and liquid. to seal cracks, cover the good side with tape and approximate the edges as close as possible. on the other end, you just sprinkle the powder along the crack the put droplets of this solution. the powder itself is plastic, the solution melts it and the plastic around and cements everything together, solid!! you can even fill in gaps and it can replace plasic pieces (the kit comes with this reshapable mold that you wrap around stuff like tabs and take a mold off. then you superimpose the mold over the damaged area, fill in the powder, liquid and voila! no plastic welding ever required! BTW, i dumped my bike almost the same way as you did with left side damage. the tab for the fairing near the tank broke off, thankfully it was still on the bolt. took that off, placed it back over the hole and used plastex.

 

My lower was getting a minor stress crack. On the back side I roughed it up with 80 grit, cleaned with rubbing alcohol, layed a thin layer of PVC pipe glue, layed on a small piece of window screen, and another layer of glue.

Two years old and no problems.

Mike