Rear End falling to bits...
 

Was out for a nice afternoon ride in the Ardennes, and just returning from a dinner of trout and pasta when I stopped at some lights, a guy jumped out of his Jeep, and comes towards me. I started to fear the worst, what's he going to do? My overtake was safe, he had previously pulled over to give me more room. He then pointed out that my number plate was completely offset.


I pulled over after the traffic lights and found that the connector holding the rear snow plough to the two parts of plastic fairing had disappeared, leaving the snow plough at a jaunty angle (and not far off the rear wheel). Managed to push it back into a more normal position and rode home the rest of the way relatively gently.

Is this a common problem that people have?

It had just returned from a 12k km service the day before, had the mechanices leant on it & broken it ?

As for fixing it, do I need to use the same type of rubbish assembly, or would a nyloc nut , bolt and washers be better?

Cheers,

Tim

I dont understand. The entire undertray was hanging down? It as a couple of bolts that hold it on, and maybe they have just worked loose and fell out.

Ahhh, sensible techie stuff.

Hmmm, and there was me going to advise a severe regime of butt clenches! :wink:

Yep, the bolt and clip that it screw into had gone.

as for the buttock clenches, the trout wasn't that bad.

Great time to get rid of the snow plough and get a tail tidy

Tim, im confused. Which part exactly has fallen down? Is it the bit that the number plate holds on to, or the actual snowplough assembly (Which is one piece of plastic that runs to just in fornt of the shock?)

The snow plough (and therefore the number plate holder too) had come undone on one side at the rear allowing it to droop/hang lower on one side, pushing the rear faiting out of position, leaving the indicators wonlky too. Hope this clears it up for you.

For ease and laziness (I've still to fit my fenda extenda...) I'm just going to bolkt it back together.

I was more interested in how mnay other people experienced their bodywork falling apart for no reason apart from a few miles.

There's more than the wee screw and clips there though... In fact, those only really seem to serve to keep the bodywork neatly together, the actual work of keeping the tray up is done by 6 bolts directly into the subframe- unless you keep a load of stuff there, quite a lot of bolts would need to come undone or have their mounting points break before that became a problem i think...

Ah, ok. To be honest, i have never experienced this with the stock tray etc. IIRC, there are to 10mm head bolts, and screw that is up under the tray near the indicator. Unless the 2 bolts have fallen out, and they thread into the subframe, the screw goes into a clip i think, it would be hard for it to fall down. However, yours has, so must be something wrong.

Check for the bolts, and replace if missing.