Here we go again… So I got my bike back yesterday and I’m shocked by the quality of service I’ve received. I don’t know what they were doing the last two months, but clearly it wasn’t much of anything, it came back in virtually the same condition that I gave it to them. The paintwork has been fixed to an extent, but hell there are some \*deep\* scratches there, which on a clean paint job is pretty shocking. The level of incompetence is absolutely staggering and I will never take anything back to them be it a car or a bike.

At almost 8 months since my accident my patience is wearing thin and I’m quite tempted to take this to court and claim for the full amount and let someone else deal with this bike. When the bike went back to them — it took over a week to get them to fetch it — they were given a list (about 10 items) of stuff to fix, from what I can tell they’ve only worked on about 4 items from that list, and haven’t even done that to my satisfaction. Not to mention that this list has actually increased on return of the bike with more problems being noticed.

The main reason the bike went back was to sort out the leaking forks as there was oil spilling out everywhere; I’ve got some pretty large oil stains on the garage floor now. So apparently they rebuilt my forks and replaced the seals. I’m not sure what they did, but they didn’t do a very good job. My forks are still leaking, not as much, but there’s still plenty of oil. Perhaps the seals take a few km to set properly, but I highly doubt that. Wven if they did, they shouldn’t be leaking this much oil. If I wipe down the forks, compress them and then touch them, my fingers come away drenched in oil. This is not right; it should be absolutely dry.

There is a very thin line between riding safely and having a catastrophic mechanical failure, and leaking forks just makes that line thinner. Keeping my tyres in contact with the road surface is absolutely essential if I want to continue riding and it is my suspension that does this. I had planned on racing this bike, but if I get even a single drop of oil on the track, the other racers will be sure to gut me.

So, to recap some of the main functional problems that weren’t rectified:

• My temperature gauge readout is still very wrong.
• The trip meter is still broken.
• The forks are still leaking.

Some minor bodywork problems that weren’t rectified:

• The cracks in the fairing were never repaired.
• Some of the plastics don’t align 100%.
• The left barend wasn’t straightened and painted.
• The triple tree yoke wasn’t resprayed. This one really bothers me; it’s a very minor job to fix. It looks absolutely terrible now, even after the accident there were only 2 scratches (I have photos), but now it’s just missing paint everywhere and has been stripped down to the metal. So it’s a faded shade of black with bits of silver showing through everywhere. All this was done by them, so the fact that they couldn’t even fix up damage that they did themselves really astounds me.
• The front fender is still the wrong one; they did absolutely nothing to replace this.

To add some new problems to the list:

• The front brakes are absolutely shocking; I can pull the lever all the way to the clipon without much effort at all. When I gave it to them my brakes were extremely hard (I had just had them bled properly).
• There are now some new scratches on the fairing and tank, some of which are pretty deep.
• My right fork protector is gone… what the hell is going on here? It took me all of 5 seconds to notice that it was missing, how they missed it when putting my forks back together is completely beyond me. I’m not mechanically inclined and yet it was glaringly obvious to me. When the forks are back on the bike the left fork protector is only about 10cm away, and considering that the forks were my biggest gripe you would think they would make sure everything was there.
• I found paint \*inside\* the tank — this is \*bad\*. Having any foreign substances inside your tank is bad, it eventually finds its way into you fuel system, possibly clogging the fuel filter, damaging the fuel pump, getting burnt up and leaving residue in the carbs, etc. There are so many problems that can occur with this one and they all lead to massively reduced performance. When they sprayed my tank they quite obviously did not cover the cap properly and managed to get some spray inside the tank. When I opened it up yesterday there was a loose flake just hanging off the lip that could very easily have dislodged and landed in the fuel. This really makes me wonder how much is already floating around in the tank. The tank also had a small dent from my accident, I’m now wondering if they broke the seal inside the tank so it’s now going to start rusting.
• There’s water vapour inside the indicators… Ok the indicators are cheap aftermarket ones so they aren’t airtight, but this probably means that my bike was standing in the rain at some points in time.

Problems that I haven’t been able to check/confirm yet:

• My front wheel was buckled, they apparently fixed that but there’s no way for me to check without riding the bike.
• Brake discs. For all I know they dropped them and warped them again when they removed them to fix my wheel.
• I found what I’m pretty sure is brake fluid underneath my front fender where the right calliper connects to the left. If the metal tube that connects the two callipers is leaking brake fluid, this could become a very dangerous problem if it is indeed brake fluid. This tube is supposed to go over my fender but with the incorrect fender it goes underneath so I’m not particularly impressed, it also has slight kinks in places.

Lastly stuff that got fixed:

• The petcock is now aligned properly, so hopefully this will make removing my tail fairing easier.
• The burst stickers have been repaired.
• The paintwork was fixed in some places.
• The forks got rebuilt… apparently. See above.
• The front wheel got straightened. See above.
• The tabs that hold my tail piece on properly have been fixed. But I’d be willing to bet that they used fibreglass to fix them so they will probably snap off the first time i remove the tail.

So all in all, this whole process has been extremely time consuming and all I have to show for it are escalating costs.

Edit: To be fair I added a list (a rather short one) of stuff that has been fixed.