Questions for those who have purchased new OEM replacement fairings for 5th gen

If you have bought new OEM red lower fairing panels for 5th gen US models, would you mind answering these questions:

1) How well did the lower fairing paint color match that of the front/headlight fairing?

2) Did the OEM part (in my case lower left, p/n: 64320-MBG-670ZA) come with the "VFR -Interceptor" decal? I ask as the decal is no longer available from Honda. Replica decals exist online, but they are not quite the same and I'm trying to preserve the OEM look as much as possible.

Thanks.

- Walt

 

Bumping this up.

 

I had the VFR decals for the 5th gen lower side cowls professionally duplicated. A few folks here and on the other site have been very happy with them. These images are of the first gen decals - the final version starts with a darker grey at the rear of the VFR logo and fades to a lighter silver toward the front, and the light silver outline is a brighter silver. In my own humble opinion, they are a perfect match for OEM. Plus, paint doesn't have to perfectly match the OEM decal's red or yellow background, because these do not have a colored background.

 

Nice!

 

I didn't buy a fairing panel, but bought a never used still in bag rear seat cover.
I was worried that it might stand out being new, and going onto a back then 13 year old bike.
But it was a perfect match.
So it depends if your bike has had a lot of sun exposure, mine has always been garaged, and is only ridden weekends and long trips (120,000km now).
Red is one of the hardest colours to replicate.

 

Thought I'd show the final version. The right side panel on my 2001 needed a VFR logo decal, so I laid one on it.

Blank panel beside faded and otherwise abused OEM



OEM red background seams and color contrast with paint



v4.0 decal installed



Lack of seams, lack of color background, each letter is separate, laid out in position on the backing tape



Here's v1.0 when we were still trying to match the red background. I call this one the orange-headed stepchild

 

Gimme

 

OK, but only for you, Lint (chuckle)

 

sfdownhill,

Nice story on evolution the decals and I will admit that they look great in the pics.

In the mid-2000's, I was a development engineer at Polaris. I did mostly work for the snowmobile group (cooling, lighting, and later fuel systems), but did a little development work for ATV, side x sides, and Victory motorcycle. I had nothing to do with decals, but remember how they were applied on the assembly line. Decals like your VFR one above would be designed as a single large decal for ease of application on the assembly line. The main assembly line would be moving as some of these were applied (others would be applied to parts on feeder lines). I recall the large stripe decals on the 2004 EDGE Touring belly pan. New engineers were required to work all stations of the assembly line when they were first hired. The decal station was the only one I dreaded. While the sled is moving down the line, you are trying to prep the surface (i.e. clean), peal the decal, line up the decal, and then apply the decal with no bubbles. Now the pressure sensitive adhesive we used on decals didn't set up immediately, so you could peal it back up at least once maybe twice and re-align it. Even so, a few customer sleds on my watch ended up with the decals visibly misaligned. If a decal had all the letters separate, you couldn't do a quick re-alignment in a manufacturing environment, which, if we assume Honda used the same processes as Polaris, is why I suspect Honda has the "VFR" and "Interceptor" joined together with a body colored band.

 

sfdownhill,

Do your decals have a pre-mask sheet on top to make application easier?

- Walt

 

I ordered a new left cowl from Bike Bandit. The part arrived yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to do a color comparison in bright sunlight, but I did a color comparison last night in the dark with an LED flashlight and this afternoon in very overcast conditions. The paint match was very good under those conditions. The real difference is in “patina”. The old paint on the bike has fine swirl marks from I guess washing and the new one is pearly smooth. You could tell which plastic was new and which plastic wasn’t.

The VFR decal was on the fairing as were foam parts 5, 6, and 7 (see pic below). Part 19 was not on the fairing. Part 19 doesn't even show up in the parts list on the various websites I checked - it just shows up in the fiche picture.

I was not impressed with Bike Bandit’s packaging. The box was soft without support and had buckled at various points. The leading front corner of the cowl was poking thru a tear in the box, but still covered by the bag it shipped in. About a 1 mm x 10 mm section of paint got scraped off. It isn’t really an issue as that is the tab that goes into the nose piece. The lowest trailing corner of the fairing (what would be by the kickstand) had paint got worn off, but were talking about 1 mm x 1mm area that you can’t easily see. I suspect that got rubbed off in shipping as that corner was pushing up against the inside wall of the box as there was no foam packing to brace the fairing in the box. All they used was brown paper stuffed haphazardly in the box. As soft as the box was, I’m surprised the cowl didn’t arrived cracked. I checked the part over very carefully and found no cracks. I suggest anyone ordering plastic body parts do the same. Other than that, I’m happy.