Hawk GT Progress and Paint Plans

Well not a ton of progress progress but I did get the wheels powdercoated white and the new tires fitted along with the braided steel front brakeline, and had the bike safetied. The image above is the richly imagined future paintwork to be applied to the bike, looks like that will now be done over the winter. 

Since the bodywork will be sent to the painter "off the bike" it's up to me to tape out the areas that will get the different colours. This has to be done with the panels in situ because the painter won't know how they line up when on the bike. I want to avoid what happened to this poor guy and his Hawk.

So I applied the tape as shown above and applied the colours on MS Paint 3D... I think I need to tweak the upper line of the red on the fairing to make it *just* a little more parallel to the fairing bottom. That is, move the back edge of the red a little lower down towards horizontal. Other than that I think it looks pretty good. Decals have been ordered too.

Before I did this I took the bike out for a ride along my usual 50km route outside the city. As much as the bike needs to be caned around town to make progress (it is slow), it was great on the twisty backroads and easily attained 160km/h / 100mph indicated on the straights. Great machine and it'll look as well as it goes once I get this paintwork done.

Oh, and after I finished the tape work, as I rolled the bike off the paddock stand the sidestand dug in, retracted, and the bike tipped over. Fortunately the only damage was a banana'd clutch lever, now on the list to be replaced. Aaargh.

Mirrors for the Hawk GT

So my old Hawk GT's Two Brothers Racing fairing kit came with genuine Honda RC30 mirrors. These were "OK" but kinda chunky and clunky, so I swapped them for some smaller aftermarket mirrors. Problem was, when I got the new Hawk, I couldn't remember who made the old bike's mirrors.   

HawkGTForum.com to the rescue, as always, as a user identified the mirrors from a picture of my old bike. They are "F1" short-stem (40mm) mirrors from Bike-It. I ordered a pair from the UK on eBay.

They look good eh? Single-bolt so they are super easy to fit and stay very steady while the bike is in motion. Can't ask more than that of a mirror. So with those fitted I could actually put a temp tag on the machine and ride around a bit, bearing in mind the extreme old age of the tires...

Anyway, here's a few more shots of the machine...

 Next up I have to replace those ancient tires and refinish the wheels...

Look Who's Back!

I have to be honest, even with four bikes in the garage I miss my old Honda Hawk GT. I'd done a ton of mods on it to make it just how I wanted (TBR fairing kit, Racetech fork springs, 900RR shock, braided brake lines, etc.) and it was a lightweight, stylish bike that always turned heads.

Of course, I thought that buying my Ducati 900SS/SP made the Hawk GT excess to requirements. After all, as I wrote at the time, the Ducati did pretty much everything the Hawk did but with 35 more horsepower. But it turns out, it didn't really. The Ducati is a lot more serious than the Hawk GT, it's bigger, heavier, and more powerful. The turning radius sucks, and it's less reliable. In fact the latest garage addition, the 2003 Buell Firebolt XB9R, is a lot closer to the Hawk in spirit. It's also a V-twin and is pretty light and nimble. But I digress.

Not great looking

but you can see the potential

Anyway, I was talking to an old buddy who had a Hawk GT himself and idly inquired after whether he might be parting with it. In fact he was interesting in doing so as it hadn't moved under its own power for over 20 years, and he could use the garage space. So he fired it up (it's a Honda after all), gave it a once-over, offered it to me at a price that was reasonable, and I bought it and rode it home.

But as my late wife Pam would have said, while it was mechanically sound, it was also somewhat sad. My buddy the PO is an amazing engineer and he'd done some work to make the bike more comfortable for him, but that wasn't to my own taste. For example, one of the attractions for me was that the bike already had a Two Brothers Racing fairing kit, just like my old Hawk. But buddy had fitted high Telefix bars to soothe his bad back, and that required cutting up the fairing, and that required eliminating the top fairing bracket, and that meant the fairing wobbled all over the place when riding, plus it looked... odd. So the first task was sorting that out.

Thirty Yankee dollars got me a set of Chinese clip-on bars off eBay, and I bought some Honda-style grips like on my old Hawk. I'd never fitted clip-ons to a bike before myself, but after obtaining a 30mm socket for the triple clamp nut, away we went. It actually went reasonably well; after drilling a hole in the right clip-on bar to accommodate the pin in the throttle housing it all went back together, with the new clip-ons mounted below the triple clamp. I refitted the fairing a bit lower down and the look was not perfect, but was much improved. But the fairing was still very wobbly without a top bracket.

The plan was to pick up a bracket or make one, and restore the fairing to its original shape. I bought a suitable windscreen off eBay and planned to fit it, make a template showing what fiberglass needed to be grafted on, get a boat shop to do the 'glass work, then fit it back up and design a bracket... that's lots of work and time, (and money).

However, looking at a Hawk GT Facebook group, I spotted a used Two Brothers Racing fairing, windscreen, mounting bracket, headlight unit, paperwork, clip-ons, and braided brake line for sale in Winston-Salem, South Carolina. The price had started at $800 but reduced over time to $400... I offered $300 plus shipping and a deal was made. Score! And after a brief scare where I thought the seller was backing out to sell the parts along with the Hawk GT they came with (the prospective bike buyer ended up flaking on him) the parts eventually landed in Pembina ND.

The following weekend I whipped down to Pembina and brought back a giant box. The next morning I set to work fitting it. Wow what a difference, so much better than even the repositioned chopped up fairing. The bike was really starting to look like the classic RC31 I love so much, and riding around the block confirmed that the new bracket had the fairing mounted rock-solidly on the Hawk frame.    

Now I have a parti-coloured wonder... yellow upper fairing with white/red/blue tank and seat unit, and blue/black seat. However the next order of business will be to get the wheels refinished and new Dunlop Sportmax GPR-300 tires fitted. This will take some doing as the shop where the tires will get fitted and the powdercoater who will do the work are on opposite sides of the city. But never mind, we'll get it done. Bike-It F1 mirrors (same as on the old Hawk) have just arrived from the UK and will be fitted so I can ride the bike around a bit. Next thing after that will be to decide on a colour scheme and get the bike painted - this will likely happen over the winter if I'm honest. Too much going on in the summer!  

In the meantime here are some potential colour schemes:

On an RC30

On a Hawk GT

R/W/B scheme on the TBR Pro Twins Modified Race Hawk

Another TBR race bike

Yellow option - HB Cigs Honda GP Bike

Thanks for reading and please stay tuned (if you're interested) to see how things progress!