Jenny has been riding for two years and the Kawasaki 250 that I fixed up for her has been a great bike to learn on, but now she is ready for a move up. There is nothing wrong with a 250, especially for a city commuter, but her 2006 Ninja is a design that goes back to the 1980's and a modern fuel injected bike would be a significant improvement. The Ninja is also getting up in mileage, with about 35,000 miles on it. So shortly after I bought my 2014 Honda CBR500R I realized it would be a perfect next bike for her. She has ridden it a few times and likes it. Since California rules allow a family member to gift a vehicle to another family member and avoid sales taxes, I decided to give Jenny my bike in return for whatever she can get for the Kawasaki.
That was the plan, but I ran into a couple of hurdles. The first was that Jen didn't like the color of my bike.
Too "patriotic" she claimed. You have to cut the girl some slack.......she lives in San Francisco where being patriotic is akin to being a conservative and definitely uncool.
OK, so I would find a used 2013 or 2014 that was in the color she liked (red), gift her that one, and keep mine. I really like my bike and was perfectly happy to keep it, but I had Craigslist searches going all up and down the West Coast and I couldn't find another one that would work. What turned out to be a serious problem was that in order to import a non-California smog compliant vehicle into California it had to have more than 7500 miles on it. Most bikes I saw on Craigslist were left-over dealer models or used bikes with very low mileage. I finally decided to get the best price I could on a used red one with less than 7500 miles and swap the colored parts with my bike, which has almost 14,000 miles on it and would be no problem. A couple of weeks ago I found a private owner with a pristine red 2014 with less than 3000 miles at a terrific price, so I bought it. This, then, is what Jen's bike is going to look like, but it will not actually be this bike, but will be mine with the red tank and plastic bits:
Today I started the conversion. The first thing to do it remove the hard case brackets and the centerstand from my bike, so they could be switched over to the new bike. I need a centerstand because I often take multi-day trips by myself and need to get the rear wheel off the ground to lube the chain. It was nice to be working with metric fasteners again. I can look at a metric nut or bolt and know what socket or wrench I need for it, whereas with the Triumph and its wonky Whitworth or British Standard fasteners I could never figure out what I needed, and sometimes nothing seemed to work. Here are the luggage brackets:
and removed, with the passenger grab handles back on:
The centerstand:
That was a bit harder to get off as it has a VERY strong spring that has to be unhooked.
Removing the fairings is not going to be easy. Honda motorcycles are known for their excellent fit and finish, and the way they get such close fitting, rattle free body parts is with a lot of fasteners, of all types......some visible, but most hidden. I have the service manual for the bikes, so I should be able to figure it out, but as an example of what the directions look like, here is a page for removing just one of the side fairings:
You might think it would be easier to just swap the odometer, but to get to the instrument cluster you have to remove almost all of the fairings anyway. Since I am going to take some kind of hit money-wise I might as well gain a bike with more than 10,000 miles less than my current one.
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