Tail swap directions, step by step w/ pictures

[tt_four]

unfortunately I never took pictures the first time around, so before I sold the GS and was going through making some final adjustments/changes I took some pictures. It should give someone a good idea of what is needed to put a new tail on a GS, even if you feel like it's over your head because as you'll see, there aren't any special skills or tools being used here. Bike is a 1991, although I traded up to a new style tank because I think it looks better, but really doesn't have any affect on the tail swap. Like I said most of the work was already done when I pulled it apart and took pictures, so some steps might already be done before I get to that part, so if something looks out of place just ignore it until I come back to it. The only tool that I think is really useful with something like this is a rivet gun. You can get by without one, but they're only about $15 at home depot and are super handy to have around. A dremel helps too, but mostly just because it's more fun than fighting with hand tools on some of the harder cuts. Also used an angle grinder, but you can use a hand file if you need to.

First step is obviously ripping everything off the tail. Pull off the seat, plastics, any of the random brackets that are bolted up, tail light. pretty much you'll get it down to the subframe, battery tray and rear brake reservoir. Stock undertray has the little spot for the tool kit and it's pretty hard to work around that and still have it look nice, so I cut it straight across at that line. Hacksaw will work fine unless you've got something better. You can also see I cut up the back of my subframe. This will be somewhat specific to whatever tail light you're using. Mine was off a 90-02 r6. I cut it so there was just a flat tab on the bottom, drilled some holes and bolt the tail light straight to it. I'll get to that later. Basically at this point just set your tail on where you're going to want it after you've lined it up with the seat and cut it just short enough to fit the tail over it. If I was keeping this bike longer I would've found some kind of plastic plug, or cut up and bent some sheet metal to fit over that hole in the frame to clean it up. Mine was just left as is though.



while I was cutting I also chopped the passenger pegs(solo tail!) and with it the exhaust hanger(I'll get to the hanger in a minute). You can see I just bolted that rectifier to the side of the cross brace where the seat latch used to be.



This was the bracket for the turn signal relay and something else. It was originally bolted to the bottom subframe rail and was pretty big and ugly. I just chopped it up to the shape you see here, drilled 2 holes in it and 2 matching holes in the subframe. I used two Rivnuts and put them in the holes in the subframe so that this bracket is still removable, but honestly it's never going to need unbolted, so if you don't have any rivnuts just go ahead and rivet it straight to the frame. If you don't have a rivet gun you can just drill the holes straight through the other side of the subframe and get some long enough bolts to be able to fit nuts on the back. I made sure to keep the top of the bracket at the same height as the subframe. If it goes too high you could have it running into the bottom of your seat.



here it is with the electrics mounted




Normally I would've put more effort into the hanger, but the exhaust is so far away from the subframe that anything I did would've been ugly. If you want this any less ugly, just paint it black. Also, as you can see I painted the subframe black while I had it stripped. I left a small tab from what was the passenger peg bracket and drilled a hole in it. That's what the exhaust hanger is bolted to. There are various solutions you can come up with to attach the hanger to the subframe, but this was probably the easiest.





These are the brackets I used to mount my seat. For a while I just ran some zipties through the holes in the back of the seat, which worked, but I had to cut them every time I wanted to take the seat off. These are just 2 metal plates, I drilled 3 holes in the end, and 3 matching holes in the subframe and rivetted them on. These aren't really weight bearing parts, they just keep the seat from popping up when you're not sitting on it, so don't over stress about them.



This lets you see how they hold the seat. I drilled the bigger holes in them to match the holes in the back of the seat. Bought some pins in the hardware section of home depot as well as some of those metal pins that go with them. I also thought about JBwelding the pins in from the bottom so they stayed attached to the new mounting tabs and cutting them to the right length(real welding would've been ideal), but decided to leave them this way.





As you can see in the picture above, the seat is below the height of that crossbar on the subframe, and with the undertray under there, there's no way the seat would be able to sit right. I took a sharpie and traced right along the frame and that cross bar, you can see the line on here if you look carefully.



and cut, I used a dremel but you could make due with a hacksaw if necessary...



Back on the bike, nice and easy...





Now as you can see there's a big hole in the undertray. You can ride it like this, but you'll get mud all over the bottom of your seat, which kinda ruins the point of having an undertray. This is probably the only intimidating part of the swap, outside of taking a grinder to your subframe. Fiberglass!!



Before you get too concerned, this was the first time I've ever touched fiberglass. I've wanted to know how to do it for a while, and now that I've learned I'll probably use it all the time. You can buy everything you need in the paint/chemical aisle at home depot. You just need a pack of the fiberglass cloth, a container of resin, some paint brushes and some rubber gloves. Pick up a few face masks too. You'll want them while you're sanding. I picked up both kinds of cloth, one is a more coarse stringy material, the other is a nicely woven cloth. I started with the coarse, but it was kind of a pain. For this type of project next time I'll just cut straight to the finely woven stuff. Much easier to deal with. All you do is cut the fabric, lay it where you're gonna want it, and plaster it with the resin with your paint brush. Let it soak in well so everything is wetl and make sure you get plenty of it between the cloth and what you're sticking it to. I roughed up the plastic with some rough(80 or so grit) sandpaper to give the resin something to stick to. Get one piece on, lay another over it, more resin, another layer, more resin. Just keep going until you think it'll be thick enough and there aren't any holes or anything like that. Not the prettiest thing, but I'm please for my first go at it.





If you really don't feel up to fiber glassing something you can always go with my previous solution of duct tape and spray paint



I spent some time cleaning up around the edges with some sanding, cutting, and a little bit of bondo. I would've done more if it was something I'd ever see, but you can't really see much of it when it's installed. After it's dry just pull out the spray paint and go to town.



Bottom side looks extra rough because you can see that first layer I did with the coarse fiberglass cloth. Again you won't really see it when it's mounted.



and back in the subframe. Like I said the subframe, crossbar and wires hide most of the edges and it actually came out looking pretty clean.



Now you can see there's plenty of room for the seat to sit. the tail will also take up some of this space too.



On to the tail light. Like I said, mine was off of an older R6. I actually noticed that the stock tail light looked half decent if you flip it upside down so I was going to use that but got a good deal on this light. Drilled holes in the plastic body and bolted it straight to the subframe. Those wires were the old wires from the GS tail light, I assume most of those fittings are pretty standard so you shouldn't really have to mess with much wiring. I also took a thin piece of sheel metal and cut it out to fit along the curve of the back of the undertail, and the runs along the edge of the tail light. it was just riveted right onto the top of the undertail and then there are 2 tabs with holes that bolt in where the tail light is bolted to the subframe.





Again the license plate/turn signal bracket is just a piece of sheet metal cut and bent, bolted into those 2 boles for the tail light. It's hard to tell what is what because everything is black but if you look carefully you can see the lines. It's 3 separate pieces, the plastic undertail, the piece that filles in the hole, and then the plate bracket.



Simple enough, and some cheap ebay turn signals



This wasn't completely necessary but it's much easier than always trying to keep track of those little pins. I drilled a hole in the metal plate, got some thin plastic wire and some of those little aluminum wire clamps. You pretty much put the wire through and then hammer/clamp the aluminum down and it pinches the wire into place. Then I used some heat shrink over it. I kept it short but next time I'll make sure I leave a little extra cable so it's easier to get the pins in and out.





The tail rests right on top of the tail light. I just took some of that foam rubber stuff you can buy at craft stores and rubber cemented a few layers on top of the light so the plastic and fiberglass tail weren't making a racket. I used to only have 1 piece, but I threw a couple extra on to lift up the tail just so it lined up better with the tank. As far as it staying in place, the tail light was just a fraction wider than the bottom edge of the tail so I once I popped it on it would stay neatly in place, plus once you put the seat on it wasn't able to lift up. I originally had made some brackets that bolted to that cross bar where the original seat latch bolted on, drilled 2 holes in the tail and bolted it on, but it wasn't really needed with the seat holding it down.



Here you can see how the undertray and seat mounts fir in with the tail put in place. You can also see the 2 bolts in the tail where I used to have it attached to those brackets. Now they're just bolts to fill the holes.



I don't remember exactly what the seat was from. It was from either an R1 or an R6. Like I said, I used to have the old style tank, so I had originally uncovered the seat, cut it flat across and recovered it so it would sit flat against the old style tank. The old mounting tab was too short so I just took a scrap piece of aluminum, drilled and bolted it on and bent it to shape. It looks bad, I know.



All fitted into place. You can see the holes on the front of the tail lined up perfectly with the holes in the subframe where the tank bolts up. I replaced the original bolts with longer allen head bolts and cut a little bit of left over fuel line to work as bushings between the fiberglass tail and the subframe since it was about an inch wider. Because the newer style tanks have that indent for the seat to wrap around i thought it looked kind of incomplete so I just cut some of the thinner foam rubber I used on the tail light. I just rubber cemented it into the spot. I eventually bought some nicer stuff to replace it. If you do enough looking around you can probably find a seat that just wraps around the tank better and not need it, but if you've never noticed, those extensions on the front of the newer GS500 seats are pretty serious, and I doubt you'll find any other newer bikes that looks like that wrap around as far.



You can see why I said I would've left a little more cable. i cut them a little too short for it to really want to flex at the angle it needed to. Still worked fine, but would've been easier if the cable was longer. I can just reach in under the tail to undo them, but if you're gonna put in the extra effort to fill in that gap between the tail and the subframe you'll just need to do what I mentioned before... flip that pin upside down cut it, JBweld(or really weld) it to the metal tab and then put the clip through the top by lifting up the back corner of the seat.



You can see that the bottom of the subframe still sticks out below the bottom edge of the seat. There's not much you can do about this if you can't weld. If I could weld I would've done something completely different though, so we're just working with what we've got. I painted it black and it never really bothered me at all.





and there you have it.... Really not all that much to it, and most of you who have seen it before are probably dissapointed to see how sloppy some parts of it are, haha but that's ok. If I was keeping the bike longer I probably would've put twice as much effort into it, but the original work was done with a hacksaw and some spray paint when I was younger, and now that I have more tools and skill I just didn't really have the motivation to completely overhaul it since I knew I was going to get rid of the bike.

Just for reference, you can see what I was talking about with cutting the front of the seat flat to fit the tank in this picture, as well as how wide the tail is with the old style tank...



The newer style tank is much wider, and in my opinion looks much better with the wider tail.




and just some departing images....

[gsf500RR]

Very good tutorial  ! Will be on the wiki.

[nikfleisch]

LOVE!!! If i actually owned my 500 and not my father id be doing this is a second. anyone know of any older e's around wisconsin for a project bikee?

[tt_four]

It was actually my wifes when we started the process, so I didn't get full control. If it was mine it probably would've gotten a smaller tail, like an 04gsxr tail or something like that.

[greaseman]

this is probably the most awesome thing i've seen in a while. my life is much better knowing that the gs's butt can one day look that sexy. appreciate the pics!

[ojstinson]

I hate the term "tail swap", it reminds me of locking up the rear wheel of my CB-750 Honda on two lane Tamiami Trail in Florida in 1973, and missing getting nailed by an oncoming car ( doing about 70 ) by mere inches. To this day I sometimes dream about it and wake up in a cold sweat.

[murf425]

Is it just me, or are the pics not working...?

*EDIT*
Nevermind. It appears that the site you used to host them is blocked by my office firewall.
(Photobucket > all others, just an FYI  )

[tt_four]

Is it just me, or are the pics not working...?

Pictures better work, that took like 2 hours to write up haha. I can't see any of them though because I'm at work. I'll check it out when I get home.