I recently brought Leslie my EX3 Honda to a shop to install rear signal lights so I had a chance to look at the insides again after a year it was first installed. There was some rust already even after I had relatively kept it under a bike cover and never ran it in wet roads. So this weekend I had the chance to break it open again and here it is.
To be honest it really shouldn’t shock me considering these after market Honda parts are known more for affordability than quality, but it still bugs me to heck that they so easily rust. I mean, look below.
Look also at the license plate holder below, and check out the grey ‘stripe’ across the top of the large circle. It’s not a design, it’s an UNPAINTED section. Not only did the manufacturer scrimp on painting it, there doesn’t look to be any primer there either, so it’s surely going to rust immediately. It probably hasn’t yet because I only installed it a few months ago.
Then as if the rust isn’t bad enough, I don’t understand why the guy at the shop who put it together only put one screw on the seat lock, and a rusty one at that. I already bought a bunch of assorted Phillips and Allen type stainless nuts and bolts for him to use in different sizes. So now rust is starting to grow around the edges.
And here’s an even bigger annoyance. The shop where I first had it painted didn’t even take the time to disassemble it and paint each part individually. Using a spray can he just haphazardly painted whatever was visible. Below you can see the black unpainted areas of the rear fender.
And that’s considering I already told him I was willing to pay well for a good job. I’ve never done that before but I wanted to make it clear I wasn’t your typical customer scrimping every possible way, but I also wasn’t necessarily expecting show – quality work either. I just wanted him to fucking take his time, take it apart carefully, paint it, then put it back together again. How THE FUCK hard could that be considering they were a car paint shop, there were several cars getting painted there and they did that for a living.
It almost makes me wonder if it’s possible that they’ve been so used to trying to save their customers money so often that they are unable to distinguish a good job from a passable one anymore. Or maybe (and this is even more likely), the guy never had an idea what a good paint job is in the first place.
In fairness to that shop they didn’t charge very high, but I still didn’t get what I wanted. And I had all but forgotten about it in the almost three years that passed, but I was quickly reminded of it today.
So anyway, I had to do a little modification to install the rear taillights on the plastic rear fender below. I marked it with a pentel pen.
I used my Dremel tool to bore a small hole.
result:
But first I’m going to have the following items sandblasted and powder coated first:
Including this item called a ‘muffler stay’, which holds the muffler in place, and is also starting to gain rust.
