The windscreen was carefully shaped and sized to guide the wind over the head, while being low enough to look over rather than through. Most sport motorcycles have fairings that push the wind over the body, but direct the blast directly at the face. Full touring fairings offer better coverage and no wind blast, but at the cost of having to look through a large piece of plexiglass.
The angle and shape of the windscreen, while it may not at first look terribly aerodynamic, also acts as a spoiler, creating a substantial amount of down-force at speed and giving the motorcycle a more secure, planted feeling at well over 100 mph. (Now, what kind of engineer would I be if I didn't thoroughly test it?)
The result: no matter what speed, there is no wind blast or buffeting. Yet the fairing is low enough to be totally below the line of sight. You do not look throught this fairing you look over it. The motorcycle is remains a sport bike -- minus the wind fatigue and noise.
The hand protector-turn signal "wings" are similar to those of the K100RS, however I chose not to put the rear-view mirrors into the wings as the K-bike does, since the mirrors on the K give you a very poor view behind. The mirrors and turn signals are from the R100RS. The turn signal wings are designed to break away if the bike falls over to prevent major damage. (And yes I even tested this -- inadvertently.)
The fairing was molded in hand-laid fiberglass. This is the first proof out of the mold. The difficulty in production and marketing at this point is that various motorcycles have different frames and a mounting frame must be designed and constructed specifically for each model.
Other design details: There are no visible screws on the outside surface of the fairing. The entire fairing comes off with six allen-head screws in about three minutes. The headlight bulbs may be changed without removing the fairing or headlight. The front opening is sized for an extra large radiator, and the side vents allow the hot radiator air to go somewhere other than your shins. The lower part of the fairing is high enough to clear the cylinder heads and pipes of a BMW twin.
Originally the Yamaha had red, white and blue paint. There is still a little blue and white left on the tank and rear end, but I am of the opinion that more that one color on a vehicle is a bad idea (typical of many Japanese bikes) that is often used to disguise poorly shaped bodywork. You don't often see Ducati, Ferrari, Jaguar or BMW do it on their vehicles.
I would like to see enough interest
in the fairing to try and produce mounting kits for selected sport or sport-touring
bikes. However, these days most bikes come with tightly-integrated bodywork
from the factory and asking someone to throw this away and pay quite a
bit of money for my fairing (even though it may work better than anything
on the market) seems like a pretty hard sell.
back to Eric Peltzer Sculpture and Design home page
Technical stuff: AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIBERGLASS PROCESS
I have had a few inquiries from other motorcyclists about what it takes to complete a molded fiberglass project like this. It is probably more work than one would at first think.
To give you a basic idea of what
you'd be getting into, the process went something like this:
1. I made a small clay model of the basic shape of the fairing. The model was about six inches or so long. As opposed to sketches, this allowed me to view the shape from all angles, and to experiment and see results of different shapes fairly quickly. Things to think about at this point are also stuff like, what windshield are you going to use and what will it be shaped like? What lights and turnsignals are you going to use? These considerations can have big impact on the visual design possibilities.
2. Next I measured the motorcycle pretty carefully to make sure the fairing would fit. This is tricky and is difficult to do precisely. You need to make sure that the handlebars and cables can move when the steering goes from lock to lock, and the front wheel and fender will not hit when turning or compressing under suspension, and that there is room for the metal frame that attaches the whole thing to the motorcycle frame.
3. Next I purchased a large chunk of polyurethane foam from a company in Burbank California. This foam is the same stuff used by florists to stick flower stems into for arrangements. It is easily cut and shaped, and doesn't melt when polyester resin is applied to it. Don't use styrofoam (stryrene) as it will melt! (I learned this from experience many years ago.)
This foam was cut into big blocks which formed the full sized modelling base for the fairing. I used the small clay model and a scale ruler to enlarge the shape, cutting and carving away and sanding the foam. The foam is much faster and easier to work with than, say, plaster or clay. It is also light and strong and dosn't need much support. (Large clay and plaster full-size mock-ups need some kind of reinforcing armature.)
One difficulty is getting the form to be symmetric. The left and right sides need to be closely the same and this took quite a while.
One drawback of the foam is that you can't easily add to it, you can only subtract. If you go too far and take away too much, you have problems. If you've never worked with foam before, do some practicing. For instance, do a half or third scale model of the faring shape. This doesn't take much foam and may also allow you to refine the shape even more.
4. Once the full-size foam shape is achieved, you have a couple of options. You need to decide if you want to mold the shape so that you can make multiple examples, or if you only want one and so can skip the mold.
You can always make a mold from the finished glass later (although this will probably destroy the paint.)
5. For a mold, I would recommend fiberglassing on top of the foam and using this as the actual surface of your mold "positive". This way you have a nice hard surface to refine, polish, and perfect to make sure you have the best mold possible. I made the mistake of trying to make a mold straight off the foam, coated with mold release. The mold release didn't release very well and I was left with an almost ruined mold and positive. I ended up making a second fiberglass positive from this, then having a professional fiberglass company make an excellent super-thick mold from my fiberglass positive. This only cost a couple of hundred dollars and was well worth it, as they gave me the first positive out of the mold for free. It is this positive that is on the Yamaha.
6. So anyway, if you only want one,
you can skip the whole mold-making process and just finish the first fiberglass
that was laid on top of the foam. This means using a mold release and probably
destroying the foam to remove it from the fiberglass. I would recomment
a fiberglass thickness of at least 1/8." This is pretty heavy, but fiberglass
flexes a lot and can crackle the paint on top of it. Also thicker glass
can mean less metal framework necessary to support it on the motorcycle.
My fairing is built more heavily for greater strength and longevity, rather
than for absolute light weight. I think it weighs about 15 to 20 pounds.
plus about 5 pounds for the metal frame.
7. Once you've got a finished fiberglass fairing, you need to make a sub-frame to attach it to the motorcycle. This is also a lot of work and requires cutting and welding of metal tubing. Luckily I am a metal sculptor and have all the equipment. My frame was TIG welded steel. I made a frame out aluminum once but it turned out to be not worth the trouble. Steel is very strong, reasonably light and much easier to weld. It doesn't fatigue like aluminum.
8. Windshield. If you want a bubble windshield with compound curves, you'll have to have it molded. Or you might be able to use the windscreen from some other fairing or even a bubble skylight window or some other ready-made plexiglas product. You need to decide this at the beginning, because little difficulties like that can stop a project dead in its tracks.
I neatly sidestepped this difficulty by having an essentially flat windshield, with only a simple lip at the top. This is essentially the same design as the BMW K100RS only taller and wider and having slightly curved edges. I curved the lip myself using a heat gun (as used for stripping paint) and 1/8" thick plexiglass.
The windshield is attached to the fiberglass with "Goop" flexible adhesive around the back edges, which has withstood 100mph plus air blasts with no problem. I hate using screws to attach things. Plus the glue was very neat and clean looking and very easy.
I designed the turn signals around the light assemblies from an old-style original BMW R100 RS fairing.
9. Finally paint the fairing. Wait until after the frame and everything else is completely done, otherwise you'll just scratch up the paint. There are additives to paint that make it more flexible, and can prevent the flexible fiberglass from crazing and cracking the paint. I sprayed it myself using DuPont Lucite lacquer, which dries fast and can be polished and sanded afterward. There are about nine or ten thin coats of paint on it. However, next time I think I would have someone else do it and use a polyurethane paint and a thick clear coat with a flexible additive.
I painted the inside a semi-flat
black with a spray can.
Now that I think about it, it's an awful lot of painstaking work. I guess I spent about a year and a half on the project. There are a lot of details I am glossing over. Don't kid yourself, this is a major project. Details, details, details. And don't plan on ever selling the bike either, you'll never get enough money out of it to justify the effort you put into it.