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Took all my fairings off including, for the first time, the front fairing. I finally switched my headlight and mirrors to the new front fairing I've been sitting on for a year (I put a small crack in the original by trying to ride off with a cable lock threaded through the tire/forks/fairings). I'm going to repair the original and sell it.
Anyway, at the same time, I bought a pack of eight rubber well nuts and eight blue bolts with the intention of replacing all the bad rubber well nuts on the bike. After finding several more well nuts than I knew existed before, it turns out that it wasn't nearly enough. Ah well. Eight blue bolts wasn't nearly enough either, though I really only bought the $16 pack for the well nuts. Now it's going to cost me $32 total for all the bolts and well nuts but buying them from someplace else would only give me miss-matched bolts!
Here are the locations of all the rubber well nuts that I know of:
2x in the tail fairings under the passenger seat/solot sport cowl.
2x in the undertail, one of which requires removing the right-side passenger peg (you can leave your exhaust "floating")
2x in the RH lower fairing
2x in the LH lower fairing
2x in the windscreen
2x in the fairing stay under the windscreen/upper fairing (longer bolts from the bottom of the windscreen)
2x inside the upper fairing for the headlight mount
Even though I've never taken the front fairing off before, I found one of the inner well nuts holding the headlamp on to be smashed into two pieces, so this shows that it has nothing to do with users not being careful and everything to do with bad rubber. The only four that could be reused in my case were the two in the RH lower (probably replaced on a previous dealer service) and the two in the upper windscreen (go figure... the MOST exposed). Even so, they were badly deformed and it likely would not have been possible to remove them. Luckily, I didn't have to remove the windscreen ones to transfer it to the new upper fairing.
At the same time I replaced a couple plastic rivets with ones from a generic metric bike hardware kit from Cycle Gear. Only one of my six small rivets was broken but I replaced two to keep things even (they looked different; the kit only had two that fit). I replaced the front-facing large rivet because all of them looked ratty and, well, the kit only included one large rivet that would fit. There was a much smaller one that sill looked to have the right size underneath but I'll try that one in the future.
I removed my gauge cluster to replace the rubber bulb over the trip meter reset button but I somehow misplaced my replacement and had to put it all back together. It was actually the only reason I decided to go ahead and spend all day taking everything else off and now I'm going to have to do it again. I finally found the rubber piece AFTER arriving at work but I needed it all back together to get to work. Unfortunately, I spent too long looking for it and had to hurriedly put it all back together. As a result, I dropped and lost one of the tiny copper lock washers from an electrical terminal on the back of the gauge cluster and I forgot to reconnect my speed sender untill AFTER the upper fairing and shroud parts had all been secured and riveted. That was tough to do blindly! I forgot to reconnect my headlights until all the fairings were installed but that was MUCH easier.
I found that getting the two well nuts between the windscreen and the upper fairing stay installed with shorter bolts (like with a colored bolt kit) was almost impossible to do by reaching around and squeezing the well nuts. I could only get one to thread that way. Instead, I took the fairing off and partially threaded the well nut just enough so that it was still straight (not deformed) and then worked the fairing into place, forced the well nuts into the stay mounts, and screwed them down to secure.
Despite my coolant leak on the left side (intermittant drip; dries white/chalky), my reservoir was at full after months of not checking (almost impossible with the fairings on). I actually left in the middle of all that to buy coolant because I was so sure that it would need some! Yes, I did check with the bike level/upright.
I did encounter some problems. When I first turned the bike back on, I had no light behind the speedometer. After moving the bike only a tiny bit it came on and stayed on for my test ride and my commute to work. It appears to be fine but I don't know what caused it. Perhaps the missing copper washer? Now that I've found the replacement rubber bulb for the trip meter reset button, I'll be taking it apart again but I'd like to know if I need one of those little copper lock washers BEFORE I go through that again (I don't want to do it a THIRD time!). Also, I can see some light bleeding in from the right of my fuel gauge so the alignment is off there somehow. That's all stuff to look at when I do the rubber bulb! That said, I tore the old rotted rubber bulb into three pieces when trying to get it out before I knew I had lost the replacement so I had to rubber cement it all back together to keep water out. Condensation inside my gauge cluster from the rotted bulb + rain has caused crazy-weird behavior in the past.
Oh, and I cleaned all my old fairings in a tub, which made for one heck of a clean-up job with tons of pebbles/grit and waxy/oily stuff in the tub. I doubt I'll try that again. I did find that I've run over things that scuffed up the undersides of my lower fairings so I need to polish them with some rubbing compounds to see if that helps.
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