Today I stripped my bike apart so I could swap out the air filter and do an oil change. No wonder dealerships charge so much for this crap. I started taking stuff off and it didn't seem to end. Fairing piece after fairing piece without end. Almost.
Anyway, I got it striped down mostly to see what I could do and how things went together. The biggest real issue is that the bike has been in at least two lowside incidents so the screws on one side had been ground down a lot. One screw was so bad it no longer had the slots for the screw driver. I had to use a pair of pliers to remove it.
I had two additional problems. First, my buddies at Bike Bandit sent me the wrong air filter. No biggie the bike has all of six thousand miles on the clock and the filter is not dirty yet. I'll send it back and get a refund. The big problem though was the blasted oil filter. I do not have a filter wrench small enough for a motorcycle oil filter. Autozone doesn't either. I'm going to have to go to the motorcycle store and buy one later this week. For now I jammed a screw driver through the old filter and removed it that way. The new filter from K&N (also from Bike Bandit) has a 17mm nut on top so I just screwed it on using a wrench.
While it was apart I discovered that the fairings are a little more cosmetically beat up that I had expected. The right side has a big scratch down it which I knew about. However, after getting it apart I discovered that the left side lower fairing has a nice bit of road rash on it. In case you are slow - I just got the bike. The lady who owned it before me was a real demon judging by the absence of chicken strips on the rear tire. In fact the tires are shot and I'm getting new ones next week.
So this was my first adventure wrenching on a motorcycle. I have plenty of experience working on cars. Bikes in some ways are a bit easier. Just gotta have the right tools.