Being a dual sport, this bike has been dropped, scraped, crashed in general. It’s a tough bike and will keep going after you pick it up, but the plastics will take a beating. Not only that, but they’ve stained from grease or dirt being rubbed into them. I thought about going with all new plastics, but then I saw some youtube videos about people restoring their old dirt bikes and had some tricks to restoring the plastic too.
I watched a few different videos, some people were simply wiping them down with cleaner and elbow grease, and others went as far as scraping the entire piece with a box cutter to cut out the faded plastic. Thankfully, yellow and white plastics don’t really fade, or at least it isn’t obvious. I took the tips and tricks from all of these videos and cherry-picked a few.
First thing was to sand them down a bit. I didn’t need to go full out with a box cutter since most of it was alright. Instead, I wet sanded it down with some 400 grit to take off the staining and get rid of some of the major scratches, then did a second pass with 2000 grit. I definitely didn’t take all of the imperfections out, but I got the big ones. Sanding around the decals and stickers was tough, some of the stickers I had on were applied over the stained bits. I got around them as much as I could, but now they kinda look like they have a shadow effect on them.
Sanding everything took out the grime but left things pretty dull. To get out the fine scratches get some shine back into it, I hit each piece with a heat gun. This helped a lot, but it’s tough to keep it consistent. There are a few spots that didn’t melt back very well, but not too noticeable. I heated up each piece off of the bike too, so I realized that putting them back on some didn’t quite line up. It should be fine after they were tightened down.
Last piece of the puzzle was a can of bike polish, and a test ride. Not quite as clean as the grom got, but much cleaner than other dual sports!
