Hello all, My name is Miles and I'm a newbie on the VFR forums. I'm also new to owning a VFR as well; i have always wanted one since i was interested in street bikes but wound up buying new for my first bike (2013 Aprilia Shiver 750). That thing was great! Unfortunately i totaled it early last year and was without two wheel for a bit of time. While out searching for a new bike i realized $2500-$4000 was out of my price range but i was determined to pick up a 4th Gen Honda VFR.
I discovered the existence of CoPart after my Aprilia was sent there to be auctioned off. I starting looking through there for my future viffer; alas a 95 popped up in Eugene, OR totaled with 10,021 on the clock. It looked like complete hell but with mainly cosmetic damage from the wreck, i knew it was the one. $600 later and a nice road trip to OR and it was mine. Man oh man was she dirty and just bad all the way around, but the oil was clean and it started right up so it couldn't be all bad. Right upper fairing, side fairing, lower fairing, coolant bottle, windscreen and mirror were destroyed. The rest of the cosmetics were covered in rhino liner and rattle can trim black to hide the fact that they were all so messed up. Tires were old commuters that were complete trash, chain was rusted and toast along with the rear brakes. Suspension was shot and the bearings are all questionable. I knew I had my work cut out for me, also knew my bank account was gonna take a few hits on the way as well.
I started documenting the bike after i tore it down due to my sheer excitement and forgot to photograph the immediate condition it was in when i got it. It wasn't needed though for it would just cause a world wide cringe of all VFR lovers. With such low miles and the immensely poor condition it had to of sat for a very long time. Which worried me heavily that i would be spending some good cash to get the carbs redone (i don't trust myself with very small super vital parts, they scare me). I decided i wanted to ride it over the summer rather than just have it sit for who knows how long until its done, so i rocked the naked look with some quick shotty fabbing to get me by. First was OE style air filter to replace the aftermarket massively over oiled filter, oil, plugs, coolant ect. The coolant came out a chunky brown slurry full of corrosion, years of neglect, and the tears of every Honda engineer who helped create this machine. The bike was actually un-rideable as it was, sort of like a rocket powered sponge on hard plastic tires. So tires and suspension was next, a cool $1500 later for a rebuilt front end and some new Q3 tires and she felt great! Also dyno'd it at 93 HP right out of the scrapyard with no carb work!!!! She ran fantastic. Turns out it also had Two Brothers full system on it which is pretty cool, except for cylinder 3 header was almost completely cracked all the way around it almost broke in half coming off. The muffler was attached to the collector via Shucks $3 pre-bent 2.5" pipe with screws running through it as spring holders, which was then duck taped together and wrapped in an exhaust wrap to try to hide the shame. Talk about a bad exhaust leak!
I put about 1200 miles on it over the summer while repairing cosmetics and fixing issues as they arose. The bike is such a blast i love it, even in the state of always being 50% 100% of the time. Until winter struck, now its go time for fixing it up with no excuses! I started to get a leak from the water pump which didn't really surprise me due to the condition of the coolant when i got the bike. I resealed the front cover with a new gasket and flushed the system a couple of times, it started leaking the next day. I repeated the process to no avail; it was leaking from the weep whole and the pump was shot. I ordered a used pump from the UK and it looked so much better than my own. I replaced it with no issues the used pump works great. There was a rather large bulge on the outlet hose of my old one so i took it apart to see what it was and it was just a huge pile of corrosion that had sunk to the bottom of the system and congealed, i couldn't believe my eyes. I had forgotten all about the clutch master and slave until i started to lose engagement and had trouble shifting into a couple of gears. I opened the master to find about a half an inch of dark pudding....i had to scraped it out with an actual spoon, needless to say it was overdue. A quarts of brake fluid later and i had pressure again and clear fluid moving through the lines. When it was time to replace the old chain and sprockets i discovered a leaky slave with no surprise. I'm in the process of rebuild that right now along with bringing life back to the dirty rear hub while its apart for the rear disc swap. I'm going with 16 45 on gearing with a DID 530 chain.
The wiring was a complete joke, totally hacked up by some previous owner who thought splicing was done by tying wires together and throwing a piece of electrical tape on it was good enough. The tail end of this thing was such an atrocity it's mind boggling. Someone wanted and integrated tail light and no blinkers so badly that they actually cut the blinker mounts out of the plastics, and reshaped the tail fairing of the bike to only accommodate the taillight. They even cut holes in the taillight and stuffed some unregulated led bulbs in it for blinkers along with the 50 cent led's to replace the factory brake light. When those failed to give any illumination they used an old piece of the fairing to stuff into a slit the cut in the taillight to separate the lights! You can't make this stuff up. My lights also constantly fluctuated to the point my fellow riders would pull aside thinking i was flashing them for some reason, nope just me and my permanently flashing lights. I purchased a new REC/REG and a VFRNess and it solved that issue right away (awesome quality on the VFRNess by the way). I fixed the tail the best i could for what it was, but i already see cracks beginning to emerge (fiberglass to plastic joints will never hold for long) the fitment of the thing is atrocious, but with the new Project R led taillight in it does actually look fairly slick after 4 hours of bracket fabrication...
For the paint and cosmetic it was pretty simple for me because I'm an auto body painter so i do it day in and day out, just a full weekend and a few hours after work every day and she was sparkling new. I went with a color names Sapphire Black because i couldn't decide on blue or black, so i did both! in the dark, or shade, or if you're looking at the bike from an angle (the flop of the color) in industry terms the vehicle is straight black. Only when the sun or light source hits it directly does it show the deep blue pearl hiding underneath. It took a little time to modify the paint to look how i wanted and I'm stoked on it! Also my wheels are getting powder coated white as i write this :D due to a very bad paint reaction when i went to spray them, sandblasting and powder coating is the choice for wheel coating. I have wheel bearings on the way for when i go to put them back on, figured might as well while they are out. I'm going with a smoked Zero Gravity DB on the windshield to tie it all together. I'll begin putting all of the fairings back together this week, my front stay fairing and gauge cluster mount is bent to hell though...i did some pulling on it at the shop but who knows how bad it really is. So as an offering to my future self i ordered a used one off Ebay that will be here Friday. I'm also going to get the Delkavic DL10 high mount exhaust to show off the SSSA when i have the proper funding, looking forward to getting it all put together here in the next month or two.
I have tons of photos documenting most everything i have gone over in my write up, i also have a few good videos as well. But i believe I'm going to make a YouTube compilation of the "VFR Chronicles" so it can be viewed as one big long video of the debauchery that went on to make this thing what it is today. When that is complete I'll be sure to post a link to it for your enjoyment :). If you read this whole thing you are a champion and i truly appreciate the time you took to analyze my poor sentence structure along the way! I'll try to keep updating as much as i can going along in the future for anyone who is interested in my little adventure into the 4th Gen world!
Thanks, Miles
[image: IMG_20160620_211049290.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160620_211057504.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160620_211105049.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160620_211110936.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160620_211118488.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160622_201632227.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160622_201646958.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160622_201658031.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160620_211235843.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160620_211252412.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160624_205111335.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160624_205122479.jpg]
[image: IMG_20160624_205128595.jpg]
![[image: emoji106.png]](http://emoji.tapatalk-cdn.com/emoji106.png){kind=link}