Makeover Time!

After some time away, Mark’s K2 is back for some cosmetic surgery…

- Mark Haycock

This time I want to start looking at cosmetic items such as trim and paint on the CB750K2.

For the USA, the K2 was available in a choice of Briar Brown Metallic Custom, Flake Sunrise Orange or Candy Gold Custom. In my opinion at least, the most attractive colour was orange and it was a pity that was not an option for the UK market where most bikes were gold. Mine, however, was brown and this is not a colour which I would choose though I must admit it does not look too bad if it is in good condition, clean and shiny – which mine was not.

It would need a respray, but first there were a few things I needed to sort out. One is shown in Photo 1. Cracks like this are commonly seen in plastic side-panels and they are caused by ignorance on the part of previous owners. Not knowing any better, people naturally grab hold of the most accessible part of the panel, which happens to be near the top, and pull hard to yank it off. You are meant to carefully release the lower mounting then equally carefully pull the top two in turn, and do the reverse to fit the panel.

There are a number of ways to repair this sort of damage and I think most restorers would turn to plastic welding. I decided to use a technique which worked perfectly well when I repaired the crash damage to my Hornet seat cowling and does not need any special tools.

Last time I knew that the plastic was ABS so I bought a sheet of ABS, cut some little pieces and glued them on to the crack to hold it together. This time though, I had no idea what the panel material was but it occurred to me that it does not matter what it is as I am merely gluing bits of plastic to it – so I just used the same technique and materials as before.