While this project set away as a touch-up job of the bike there’s also a bit of work needed on the sidecar, mainly cosmetic but there’s a bit on the underside will need a portion of a panel replaced.

There’s a place under the seat where water can accumulate, remember it is an open sidecar! and the base panel has corroded through here. It’s not at a point that’s structurally important so what I intend is to simply seal up and re-inforce the existing panel.

Rather than weld the new part in place, which could result in places where more water could accumulate I’m going to use epoxy to fit it and I’ll sandwich some glass mat between the old part and the new.

Another touch-up is at the nose of the body where there is an area where the paint has lifted away with rust underneath. This will need cutting back to bare metal, treating with a rust preventative and a repaint.

The body on the sidecar is a Polish made replica I fitted when the old body became beyond repair about 15 years ago and while a nice copy I don’t think the surface preparation of the bare metal was as good as it might have been, but still at least it was available!.

What I’m doing is to use a wire brush in the angle-grinder to remove the rust itself. This will need some care as the panel is edged with an aluminium trim.

With the panel scoured clean then the ally trim needs to be masked off, as did the surrounding bodywork before panel could be treated, I’ve some Bondaprimer that goes on first to etch into the steel surface before the primer/surfacer, a couple of coats of that, flatted down and then the top coats added.

So with the body upside down on the trestles and a piece of 2mm steel plate I began work.

First was to cut the plate to suit, and as the panel came up to the cross channel in the bodywork thats to clear the chassis cross tube I bent the end over at 90º.

The body area was well cleaned down and swabbed with Panel Wipe and then I turned to the patch plate.

This was given a good scratching to key it for the epoxy and then it too was swabbed down with the Panel Wipe, glass matt was cut to match the patch and then laud up on it with epoxy resin.

The beauty of the resin I used is its extended working time, there was plenty of time to then coat the damaged area of the body with more epoxy and then offer the patch plate up to it,

An old carrier bag was then placed on the plate and a heavy weight put on that to compress the joint and the whole thing left overnight to set.

Next day the exposed metal of the plate was given a coat of the epoxy resin and some glass cloth laid up onto it to seal the surface.

Once this had set up the whole patch area was given a couple of coats of paint, it’s on the underside of the sidecar body and masked by the wheel and mudguard so cannot be seen so it has not been necessary to camouflage the repair, the paint job being sufficient.

When you start any upgrade job you will normally find that it leads you onto others that you did not foresee.

So far this has led me into the fuel tank repair, I had anticipated retouching its paint but not the leak repair and full repaint that will need and now I have to redo the wiring for the rear lights and sidecar.

This has been done with a length of “choccy block” connector between the main loom and the rear light unit, it’s effective but not ideal, especially when exposed to the weather as it is on a bike. What I intend is to get a pair of 6-way vehicle connectors that will use 6.3mm spade terminals in place of the current terminal block.

For the bike’s rear lights I only need 4 wires, ground, light, stop light and left indicator but for the sidecar there’s these 4, the other indicator and the spotlight, (as I tow a small camping trailer with the outfit I need power for both indicators to the sidecar).

Equally, as standard the Earles fork model BMW had a DIN jack socket under the saddle. Originally this was wired in to the sidelight circuit and was the supply to the sidecar’s running light but when I fitted the sidecar, rather than just the running light, I also fitted it with an indicator and a stop light (remember I run with a right-handed sidecar in the UK) and later added the spotlight.

What I’m doing now is replacing the mare’s nest of connectors and wires between the two with a multiconnector and the DIN socket will become a permanent live socket that I can use to power the tent lights, run a mini tyre pump etc and to charge the battery if needs be.

I have a choice here as to the wire colours. The bike is a BMW and uses the DIN standard wire colour code.

I have a tow hitch on the outfit and this matches the standard trailer wiring code and so the two have to join somewhere.

What I’ve decided is that this will be at the sidecar/bike junction so all the wiring on the sidecar itself will follow the trailer colour code.

This has the advantage that I can use standard trailer cable for the wiring loom of the sidecar and not have to make up my own bundle, I only need 5 connections so I’ll use a 6-way connector block between the two and slide a length of pedal cycle inner tube over it for weatherproofing.