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.