With the paint drying its time to turn my attention back to the empty frame.
Now I'll save you all of the hundreds of photos I took along the way as I stripped the frame down and just give you the highlights as it were. The more I looked at the overspray from the paint and the light surface rust on the frame the more I knew that something had to be done. I was considering painting the frame as I'd not done that before but decided that powder coating was probably going to be the easiest and more resilient option as I'd found a good company to do it with the TZR.
Before I can take the frame away I needed to sort a sticker out. Near the headstock is this little blue and white sticker, and I think its quite cool and something that I'd like to preserve on the bike. But it cant go through powercoating. Thankfully I managed to remove it with a sharp Stanley knife blade without damage. But I'm going to have to do something with it before it goes back on. That plan is in the works.
But anyway, what is the sticker I hear you ask? Well a little googling tells me its some sort of anti-theft scheme from Japan. Basically if it gets sold you can contact the scheme to ensure that its legitimate and that the owner has the right to sell it as I understand it. The best thing about it is the the numbers on the bottom have some meaning and shows that the bike was at some point and originally registered with the scheme from the Fukuoka prefecture. Awesome.
Not so awesome was the lower fairings upper mounts. That doesn't look factory to me.
And the other side was even worse. It would appear that at some point for some reason the brackets mounting tabs were removed and then replaced with this monstrosity held in with self tapping screws. If anyone has a template of the correct tab it will be much appreciated...