Vintage Workshop
Services for Brough Superior motorcycles and their contemporaries

Saving the Douglase's old mudguards..

Actually, an enquiry from my friend Juris had prompted me to have another look at the old mudguards - he had asked me to make some sketches and give him the dimensions of them.

So I got them out of the shed and made a few measurements and pictures.

The rear one did not look too bad, being just dented and rusty and having only few cracks...

 
... but the front one was in a rather sorry state. I understand the whole bike was built to weigh under 200lbs to be to benefit from the road tax concessions available to lightweights from 1925.

 To achieve this, a few bits have been made very light. The mudguards are of incredibly thin sheet metal, and to stiffen the wobbly affair, a strip of slightly thicker sheet material, profiled for reinforcement, was run along the length in the centre of the mudguard profile. Not being too well painted, both were pretty rusty and had a lot of cracks.

Well, I went ahead and drilled out all the rivets holding the attachment brackets, the central stiffener profile and the mudguards together. I vapour blasted the mudguards, and carefully welded up the cracks.

Then I treated them with Fertan, a rust remover/converter that leaves a dark blue residue on the previously rusty surfaces.

The water-based fluid needs to be re-moistened for about 48 hours. 

I painted the inside of the mudguards with primer and black paint and made new, slightly more substantial, reinforcement strips.

The end result looks quite ok to me. The old paint has been saved where it was still there, and the other patches don't look too ugly.

Ok, the die-hard authentic&unrestored fraction will say I should have left the 'guards as rusty as they were, but it looked too awful to me....

I think overall the bike looks quite ok now. 

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