As I described before, I was able to finish my tour of Normandie but at the end the support of the front panel was in very bad conditions.
Although I was able to repair it on the road, this was clearly not sufficient and a more thorough repair work was now absolutely required.
Here on the right we can see a detail of the front of the bike after I arrived in my garage: a little bit scaring… although the support apparently was not really moving.
So let’s see all different steps required for fixing in a more definitive way this issue.
Since the aluminium was not very thick I already excluded any solution based on “welding” type of technique.
As suggested from my friend Stéphane, I decided to use fiberglass to make the support more solid.
1) I cut a wooden piece of the exact diameter to be used as a ‘guide’ fro fixing the support.
2) then I used the aluminium piece made by JB and further reworked to get the best fit on the frame.
3) then I was able to put in place this “clamping collar” on the frame.
4) at this point I put some resin on the wooden part and then I did slid in the the broken aluminium support .
It was really a very tight fit, so I left it for few hours in order for the resin to dry out.
5) I then started to lay down very thin sheets of fiberglass with abundant resin between the different layers.
After few hours it was not completely dry, so I decided to leave it for all the night.
6) So roughly 24 hours later I was finally able to work on the fiberglass surface to make it smoother and better looking.
This is how it looks the final repair …
