Moving In Stereo
Posted in Pix on Feb 23rd, 2009
The speakers in my Road Glide’s fairing started sounding like crap and I thought I had blown them out by playing them too loud. The problem was worse than I thought when I finally took the fairing off and went in to see what was what.
The speakers are secured by three screws that screw into mounting posts that are molded into the fairing. They look a little something like this:
The yellow circle shows one of the mounting posts. There are two more on the bottom right and left corners of the speaker itself. The problem was that the posts had sheared off on the right-side speaker — all three of them. Here’s a sheared-off mounting post and where it’s supposed to be:
Absolutely outstanding product design, don’t you think? What it really needed to hold up to the forces of the motorcycle’s vibration and the weight of the speaker was some reinforcement, so that’s what I did when I fixed it — I glued the posts back on with ABS cement, then wrapped each post with some aluminum screen, extended it out on to the surrounding fairing surface material, and gunked the hell out of with ABS cement.
It lasted for all of about five minutes. I was torquing the last few turns on the final screw to tighten it down when >>plink!<< it snapped. And then while I stood there cursing at it >>plink!<< - >>plink!<< the other two snapped as well. That was fucking awesome.
So at that point I was faced with the certain knowledge that no adhesive product was going to hold those mounting posts in place — not even the duct tape or hot glue gun my wife suggested. Looking at the second picture above, you can see the solution I came up with: I drilled holes in the fairing and mounted the speakers with bolts.
I drilled through the base of the sheared-off posts and ran bolts through them. These two pictures here give a close-up view of the just how ugly the fix is from inside the fairing.
And here’s the damage from the outside. It’s not too terribly bad, I guess, but I sure wasn’t happy about drilling holes in my fairing. It was kind of like piercing my favorite body part.
One of my friends says I’m well on my way to having a rat bike. Maybe, but at least it’s in stereo again…
