In conjuction to unboxing Moto-777 chinese aftermarket ABS fairings post, few words about the fitment.

The fitment quality of these fairings can be summarized in two words: pure shit. It took me two days to fit these in place and even while the outcome looks pretty awesome in pictures, I'm not happy with them at all. Caps are big and fitted parts don't have symmetrical shapes compared to each other. 

The actual molding work of these fairings is extremely sloppy. The whole set felt like it was shrunken in hot wash. 

• I had to remake the driving light opening from the other side and that ruined the paintwork placement in front,  red stripes are about 1 cm closer to lamp at other side. 
• All fitment holes were neither too small, at wrong place or missing completely and required manufacturation.
• Parts don't fit to each other. I had to introduce hot air blower and reshape some of them in order to get some kind of synergy between the parts.
• Few fitment sockets (I'm not sure if that's the right term) had to be severed and re-glued to right place.
• Because the parts felt likethey were shrunken, some violence was still needed for the final fitment.

Other parts used in remake

• Red levers from the2wheels. Excellent value for the money, recommended!
• Red Honda bar ends from mlabel.parts. Also good products.
• Tinted fairing led turn signals from acemotorsports. Very cool items.
• Mirrors with led turn signals from elliehome1701.  Excellent value for money.
• Red foot pegs from somewhere.

"You want to help? For once, it's easy and by helping, you'll actually make money: Buy Honda stock right now." More at Bikewriter.com

For this year I'm pimping out my wife's a bit tired looking 1997 Honda CBR 600 F and ordered bunch of new stuff to it, including new fairings.

After reading few reviews of cheap aftermarket fairings from the internetz, I ordered a set from Moto-777 via Ebay. Today they finally arrived to customs and here's the initial review.

The price.

Fairings were priced at very reasonable $371 USD, postage fee to Finland was not so reasonable $228 USD making the total purchase price to $599 USD (450€). Finnish customs officer added 107€ VAT and 17€ of customs tax. So the grand total was 574€. Not bad, since you can't really even get unpainted fiberglass fairings with that price.

Communication, delivery & packaging

The total waiting time from payment to receiving the items was about 5 weeks. The actual transport of goods took only 4 days, so the manufacturation (or what ever they were doing) took about one month.

The whole purchasing process didn't go through without problems. While waiting the items, the guy either got kicked out from Ebay or closed his account and I couldn't get in touch with him. Having only the Ebay messaging system and no email address, I couldn't get in touch with him and ask what's happening, where's my fairings. Didn't also get answer to messages sent via his website in reasonable time. After opening a case to Ebay resolution center about this, the items were posted almost during the same day and my message sent from his website got response. Not cool, but at least I didn't get scammed.

Items were packed pretty well and almost everything was there. Only things missing were additional Honda logo and text stickers that were promised in the Ebay listing, but I can live with that.

The paint quality

Keeping the price in mind, I wasn't expecting anything spectacular and that I didn't also receive. However, the quality of the paint is better than I dared to expect. There are few minor runoffs here and there, but they are in places where nobody sees them. The visible areas are alright, with two exceptions.

Left top fairing had pretty nasty scratch in it. It might go away with little work, but the part was packed in a way that the scratch has been there already when packed. No points for quality control.

The right back side fairing had even more awful scratch in it. This will most definitely not go away without painting and has also been there before the item was packed, so again fail by quality control.

Overall quality

These fairings are light, weighting way under 10kg and that directly tells you that these are made out of thin abs plasctic. These are not even near as sturdy as original fairings, but let's hope they are thick enough not to cause any problems.

The fitment between parts doesn't look like it's going to compare with originals, but the reality will be shown when the actual fitment is going to take a place. More about that later.

Keeping the price in mind and putting the irritation caused by those scratches aside, I think I'm pretty happy with these. At least they do look good! However, if I some day need another set of fairings, I will try some other provider.

Read part #2: the fitment.

There's a new section available @ absum.net -> news. For now the section is basically just a feed aggregator listing latest news from configured feeds and there's also mixed content from finnish and english sources, but more structure will get added later.

If you know any good motorcycle news sites that aren't listed, please let me know!

KTM Finland has released new RC8R 2011 pricing info and the sexy looking 175hp/184kg V-Twin beast is now priced to (almost reasonable) 21k€, which makes it almost 2k€ cheaper than it's japanese rivals Kawasaki ZX10-R ABS and Honda CBR1000RR ABS. Way cool!

I have been searching for good budget monitor for a while. Many LG, Samsung and Acer monitors have been tested, but most of them are just crap what comes to displaying colors. Latest monitor brand tested is Hewlett-Packard and I think I have found my favorite brand in monitors.

I recently bought few HP x23LED monitors and they are pretty good monitors in their price range (~250€) and even better value for the money is HP x22LED monitor. It costs only ~160€ and compared to x23LED, it doesn't have glossy screen. Compared to LG or Samsung monitors in this price range, these are in their own leaque and the only thing missing is better height or position adjustment possibilities.

Another recently tested HP monitor is HP ZR24w 24-inch monitor. It really isn't a budget monitor, but it is graphic worker approved and does have outstanding visual performance. I would compare it to Apple Cinema display and would say that it is pretty much as good, but cost's less than half of it and therefore have excellent value for your money.

Since here already is lot of stuff about my motorcycles and car projects, let's update the status of them to current state.

Even though I said in my last (subject related) post, that the VTR SP-1 is the bike for me, at the end of last summer I just absolutely fell in love with KTM RC8. There was nothing I could do about it, the SP-1 just had to go and KTM had to be bought.

The bike is all stock for now, except the added automatic chain oiler, Scottoiler KTM Kit. It got it's first 6000 km to odometer before stored up for the winter without any problems what so ever.

Some mods will be made to it during next spring/summer. At the wishlist there are:

• Tail tidy parts. That original licence plate holder is just awful.
• SAS plates are already bought and will be installed/SAS removed during spring
• New exhaust system along with Powercommander. There's too little noise now.
• Black windshield for added looks.

That's about it that can be done to it. Almost every part in that bike already is the best there's available for it, so nothing much can be done to it.

Canvas Rider is quite addictive game, written entirely in Javascript & HTML5. (via nikc)

Pretty awesome little bikes made out lighters. More pictures.

I received instant negative feedback from Pnuk once I installed a Captcha module to prevent unwanted comments. I've been told that nobody uses it anymore and the version I worked wouldn't do the trick anyway since the text was way too easy to read. Sorry about that :)

Little digging around directed me to AntiSpam module for Drupal. It uses Akismet, TypePad Antispam or Defensio anti-spam service to filter potential comment spam. Don't know yet how good is it, but at least it is way more user friendly and I have to agree that the Captcha was a bit yesterdays thing...

Update: Wasn't so good after all. The module worked like charm for an day and after that it started to prevent all comments. At least for now, the captcha is back at feedback form and basic Drupal registration/login feature is turned on for comments. Your registration details are not used for anything, so feel free to create an account in order to comment.

Update #2: Captcha doesn't seem to be a good solution for preventing bot spam. Antispam module is fixed and back on now.