Bag Reconstruction
Today Paul and I tried to reconstruct my saddlebags. It all started last week when I went out and got fiberglassing materials. Cloth, mat, resin, brushes etc… I watched lots of video and of course I’m not working on nice flat boat hules. But away we went. I first made some molds out of cardboard. We had to get some different clay because the stuff I used first dried and cracked.
When we were satisfied with that I started cutting up the saddlebags. I had two objectives. One was to remove the big humps that were wasting half of the bag volume and two was to fill in the mounting and tail light holes since they were in the wrong locations and not wanted.
On the first bag we went whole hog and cut out the all the negative spaces of the bags and the holes. Then I started cutting cloth and fiber to do the patching. I did and inside and outside layer of the cloth and two layers of mat filler. I hope that it’s thick enough. Now it was time to open up the resin can but the lid would not come off. I ended up having to brake the lid off witch pulled the neck out of the can. So one way or another I was using the whole quart of resin.
Now the second bag was a bit different story. We decided that we were just going to cut out the holes and not remove negative space since it was a lot bigger chunk of the bag. Maybe I will attack that later after I see how all this turnes out.
Before you paint, decide if you’re ever going to do phase II- my experience is that it will be 100 times easier now instead of starting again later.