S Fairing Project: It's Mounted!

My loving wife picked up the windshield and mounting hardware parts from the Beemer dealer yesterday and I started working on mounting it all on the bike when I got home. I realized shortly thereafter that I was missing some pieces that I'd ordered! Damn. I luckily was able to "improvise" some replacement hardware from the local hardware store. Now I just have to make sure the Beemer dealer didn't charge me for the missing items.

Took a bit of trial and error but I believe I got the right bits in the right spot and in the right mounting sequences. It was a tight fit pulling the fairing's lower mounting holes over the turn signal mounts but I finally got it to go in.

Once the fairing was in place and mostly centered on the headlight (still needs some work), I tackled mounting the windshield onto the fairing using the expanding rivets. These were not the easiest thing to put in, even with some lubrication with WD-40 as recommended by others in the Airhead mailing list. The end rivets were definitely a PITA but I did manage to get them in.

That's when the realization of the meaning of a comment made by the previous owner of the fairing hit home. He'd mentioned that the owner of the fairing prior to him had done some trim work on the upper arms of the fairing. Me being a noobie airhead owner and never having seen an S Bike in person, looked at the pics he'd sent me and saw nothing wrong.

Well, there was, kinda. The guy had actually cut off about three inches off the ends of the fairing's upper arms. I can see why he did it, otherwise the arms would hit the brake fluid reservoir on the right and the choke assembly lever on the left. Apparently, S bikes either came with the european or "low" handlebars and not the US or "high" handlebar Brigitta came to me with.

So, it's good that he trimmed it otherwise I'd be stuck doing it or figuring out how to move things out of the fairings way if I wanted to use it. I am now debating whether to "trim" the overhanging end of the windshield or not. Any opinions out there on whether to trim the windshield or not?

You can extrapolate where the missing portion of the upper fairing arms would have caused issues.

She does look pretty good though

The windshield and fairing does help a little bit in getting the wind pressure off my chest when going at speeds higher than say 55mph. If I was trying to make this bike my touring bike, it'd need a higher windshield I think.

No, this S fairing is mostly for looks, I like the way Brigitta looked before but the S Fairing gives it that aerodynamic retro look for which the S bikes were famous for when they came out in the late 70s through early 80s.