I'll try to explain why the mod didn't work... (for me)...
Here is a pic of where I cut the fin... hoping it would slide over the Cage sim to the mod for the bathroom bars:
You can see what I used for the cuts... a single sided hacksaw. Used them on the 2 tabs, as well (looking at you, Conrad). Finish sanded with a Dremel, but the hacksaw made pretty clean cuts.
In this straight-on shot, the problem causing areas can be pointed out. 1) is the angle between the fairing pieces (right behind the loop). 2) is the distance between the fairing seam and the loop itself. 3) is the fairing seam at the top, under the mirror mount. 4) are the inner shields and shrouds that engage behind the fins:
1) The angle in the seam requires that the fairing kind of be installed from above and outside... bottom front first (with the fins), then the top front (point 3), then the back just kind of pops into place. Well... the bottom edge of the fairing is just a bit wider that the finished gap between the fairing and the loop... shown in point 2, below:
2) The gap between the fairing and the Cage loop:
Barely an inch to work with. I even tried loosening the Cage mounts to give more wiggle room, but it wasn't enough. I'm now thinking that it "might" be possible to remove more material at the bottom (where the 2 tabs were) to make this bottom edge "thinner", but I didn't think about it until this morning, so that exploration will have to wait until future fairing removal.
3) This is the seam at the top front of the panel:
Note that it wraps around the front fairing piece (up to the mirror AND back into the radiator area), which means that this part of the panel effectively needs to install from the outside... it can't really be slid in from the back of the bike (because of the angle pointed out in point 1). I was hoping that cutting the 2 tabs off the bottom (pics in previous post) would help this, but it really didn't.
4) Here is a pic of the seam between this panel and the inner shrouds:
The entire inner seam behind the fins have these shrouds that they want to engage with, which means, even more, that this panel wants to be installed from outside the bike, and not slid in from the back.
Those who have removed these panels a few times will likely understand these points more... and I'm certainly not going to COMPLETELY give up on trying to make this idea work (per my idea stated in point 2 above)... but it was getting late, the weather is finally summer here in the PNW, and my other bike is in even more pieces, so I needed to get this bike back together.
As a sidenote... all of the installation steps at the front were MUCH easier to do with those panels off... so now I'm motivated to keep thinking about this. And, by all means, if someone figures out a way to make this mod work, post it up. I think most of us would be happier if we can make it work.