Slow and Painful.

This is going to be a short post, but you can rest assured that the process was long. I finally painted my wheels, and it was time to lace them up. That is something I have not had the misfortune of doing previously. I'm glad that I took a lot of photos before I took the bike apart, because this was like trying to solve a puzzle.

The black wheels and hubs look great with the steel spokes. I'm very happy about that. I did manage to scratch the wheels up pretty bad during this process, so now I'm going to have to repaint the wheels anyway. Rather than take them all apart again to do so, I'm just going to tape up the spokes. I guarantee that it will take less time than re-lacing them.

That's all for now. I told you it was going to be short.

I see some bike parts and I want to paint them black...

Progress has been scattered, but significant. The garage was in desperate need of an overhaul, and I also needed another work bench, so I used all the scrap wood that was taking up space and made one. This worked out quite nicely, and it's been a hell of a lot easier to work on the frame up there. It's also become my painting table.

I picked up a few new goodies for the bike, and my "to buy" list is steadily shrinking. The tail light and turn signals are going to work perfectly, and look great. The tail light is going to be one of the few chrome parts on the bike by the time I'm done with it. The turn signals are aluminum.

I also picked up some awesome Gilles rear sets that needed to be mounted up. I was going to try and make it work with only the brackets that are on the bike, but it became clear very quickly that some welding was going to be needed. For that, I took a trip over to see my friend Andrew. We figured out where the controls would work out best, and welded up the new brackets.

The controls needed to be set out about 3/4", so I had to make some spacers. I also used some metal putty like caulk to smooth over the welds and make the transition from the frame more gradual. I still need to sand it down, but once its painted, you won't even notice it.

I've spent most of my time recently working on getting parts ready to be painted, and painting them. I decided that the smaller parts (hubs, brackets, etc.) would be best painted with aerosol cans since I still have yet to use the paint gun, and the frame is going to be a better place to practice.

Ceramic paint for the headers.

Shock cover prepped.

Shock cover painted.

Painting station.

So at this point the hubs are done, headlight trim ring is done, the engine mount brackets are done, and the one of the shock covers is done. The front fender is primed, but I'll probably wait to paint that when I do the frame. The headers need another coat or two. The wheels are next on the list. Once those are completed, I can lace the wheels and get a rolling chassis together. It will also be nice not to have as many parts floating around the garage. I finished up with cleaning the spokes as well. Now they just need to be polished up a bit.

Shiny!

If it wasn't for eBay, I wouldn't have these parts. Or this headache.

Well I've managed to scrounge up a heap of the parts needed to get some of this bike back together and in better working order than it was. Of course it didn't come without its trials. As we speak, I have a front sprocket on its way to me that I should of had a week ago. I'm still missing the right side cover gasket that was supposed to be in a kit that I purchased. In general, when you specifically ask a seller if a gasket kit is complete with ALL the gaskets needed to rebuild a motor, and they say "yes", and then you get it and its missing one of the main gaskets, and you want a partial refund because you're now going to have to find one somewhere else and spend more money that you didn't anticipate, and they say "its still a good deal even without that gasket. Those kits sold for $72 in 1974, which is like $250 today", and then doesn't get back to you at all, the seller is a douche. End of story. On the plus side, I scored an extra set of rear shocks for next to nothing, a kickstart shaft for $20, and got all the bearings that I needed.

I'm really making a push to get this thing done before the end of the month because I'd like to take it to the Market Days Vintage and Custom Bike Show. It's going to be pretty tight, but I'm hoping to get there. There's still a lot of prep to do before paint,  but I've made good progress over the past week or so.

In order to save myself some time and money, I've decided to clean, paint, and reuse the old spokes. They're pretty nasty right now, but clean up well. It's just going to take about 2 hours on the wire wheel to get it done. I haven't had the patience to tackle it yet, but I'll get there.

Once my dust covers came in, I did manage to finish up the forks. I changed my mind about painting them, and just went back to polishing. I'm still going to have to hit them with some more Mother's, but I think they look pretty damn good. They still need fork oil, but I'll get to that later.

My other big step last weekend was prepping and priming the frame. I've been needing to get that going for a while now, so it's good to finally make it happen. There was quite a bit of rust, so I used a combination of the wire wheel, multi tool, and wet sanding. I will say that the next time around I will most likely invest in having it sand blasted. Whether I do it myself or pay to have it done, I think it will save time and aggravation.

During prep. Owen is standing guard.

First 2 coats of primer.

 It really is amazing how much of a difference just the primer makes. This is going to look great in gloss black. Since I'm impatient, I also took some time to cut out my front fender, which I'm also quite happy with. It still needs some finish work on the edges, but it will be ready for primer soon.

This week I'll be working on spokes, hubs, frame, fenders, and wheels. We're going to need a lot more primer!

Bumpin' and Grindin'. Well, maybe just grinding.

Tabs, tabs, tabs! What are we going to do with all those tabs? Cut them off, of course! We sure don't need little hooks welded to the frame, and we definitely don't need the seat hinges or lock. And that inner rear fender has got to go.

So that's what happened. Thankfully with no drama. In this process, I also took the time to eyeball where I would like to cut the rear fender. It will be nice and short, but I won't have to do any drilling to hook up a tail light or to mount it. The stock mounting points and hardware will work fine. Here is an action shot courtesy of my lovely wife.

The rear fender cut way easier than anything on the frame, and after a bit of extra grinding, I think it's pretty even.

At this point, the frame just needs to be sanded and prepped for paint. I say "just needs to be sanded", but there is a good amount of rust to get off of there, so it's going to take a serious sanding session. Here are some pics of the frame post-grind.

The forks are also being worked on currently. They're all torn down, and I've started painting the upper forks where all the corrosion is. It will look like shit otherwise, so they're getting painted. I did the second coat of Krylon (it's not worth putting good paint there), and after a wet sand, they should be good. The fork lowers are also prepped and have the first coat of primer on them. I will be using auto paint on all the other parts, but I figure it's worth getting everything ready that I can. I also need to order the dust seals and buy fork oil to finish them up.

Oh yeah, here the first coat of primer on the rear fender. It's going to look pretty good. That's all for now.

Diligence

Wow. It's been a bit since the last post. Here's what's happening. Getting the wheels torn down was high on my priority list. It's one of the areas that needs a bit of work and replacement parts. New spokes, bearings, and paint are all on the agenda, but first the bearing retainers needed to come out. The front wheel retainer needed a special tool from Honda to remove, but since I didn't have one, a hammer and punch would have to do the trick. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work, so I recruited the help Tony from work. He brought it home and worked some kind of magic on it. In order to be able to use a more standardized tool in the future, it needs the grooves to be widened out, so that has been started, but is still on the to do list.

How such a small piece of aluminum could cause such a fuss...

Once that was out I sprayed down the rim with PB and let it sit overnight before starting to de-lace it. There wasn't a ton of rust, but I could tell it was going to give me a hard time. They came apart without much of a struggle, but it just took forever. I can tell that putting new spokes on is going to take a long time.

Rusty spokes. Mmm.

The rear wheel was next, and the retainer, though different from the front, was quite a hassle. After about 30 min of wrestling with it, I finally got it out and tore the wheel down.

The Devil.

There's so much cleaning to do on this bike, it's hard to keep it all in order. Since I was working on the wheels, I figured that's what I would work on cleaning next. The wire brush, grinding wheel, and Mother's metal polish did most of the damage. Here are some before and afters.

Front hub before.

Front hub after.

Wheels. Clean and not clean.

There's still a lot of prep work to do on the wheels and hubs since they're going to get painted. I also got really ambitious with the alternator cover. It looked like shit and I just couldn't take it anymore. So I cleaned it up and painted the Honda logo. I'm probably going to strip that paint out and hand paint it with the black auto paint that I'm doing the frame with, but I just wanted to see what it would look like. I like it.

That's all the photographic evidence that I have for now. Since there are parts spread all over the garage, and the frame and tank are somewhere else, I've been having trouble visualizing how I actually want this bike to look when its done and what needs to happen to get it there. I suppose that the priorities are the service related parts. Today I compiled a list of the items that I need to acquire. Well, I guess I don't NEED to get everything on the list, but I would feel better about the finished product with all of these parts in place.

Steering stem bearings

Front wheel bearings/seals

Rear wheel bearings/seals

Chrome spoke set

Fork dust covers

Front sprocket

Rear sprocket

Front tire tube

Engine hardware kit (allen bolt style- no more philips)

Engine gasket set

Petcock seal

Kickstart shaft

Headlight bracket

Turn signals

Brake light/plate bracket

Rear sets

Mufflers

Brake pads

Brake shoes

Air filters

My next step should be chopping the extra tabs and inner fender off the frame and working out where I'm going to mount the foot pegs, rear fender, and work on seat design. Then sand and prime the frame.  I though about trying to clean all the parts before starting to rebuild, but I don't think I have the patience for that. We'll see. 

If at first you don't succeed, switch to powertools.

It's been a handful of days since the last post, so I've got some ground to cover. Please bear with me. At the end of the last post, I was going to have a second attempt at removing the drain plug so that I could drain the oil and get the engine out of the frame. Well here it is.

Soaking it in PB overnight definitely helped, but it was still a hernia-inducing removal. And that was before I tried to get the motor out of the frame. If anyone has read one of those non-OEM service manuals, they'll understand that when it says "lift and slide the engine out the left side of the frame", it actually means "Stand over the bike and strain to lift and wiggle the 100 lb, awkwardly-shaped metal object until you can wrangle it around the 12 different tabs and bolt that are in your way.  There won't be enough clearance with the drain plug in, so remove it with your right hand while balancing the right side of the motor on the left side of the frame with your left hand. Once the remaining oil from the engine has poured out all over the floor, you will be able to force the engine the rest of the way out of the frame. You can then heave it onto the milk crate that you have set aside just for this occasion. Undoubtedly, the one of the previous owners of the motorcycle will have sprayed silver paint all over one side of the engine, which will now be all over your arms. Have a drink to celebrate!"

I did have some time to clean up the garage, which was looking like a tornado has run through it. Once organized, I wanted to throw the new tank on it to get an idea of how its going to look. I've decided that the paint is nice enough that I'll leave the stock paint intact, buy I might re-clear it just for some added protection.

The next task was to remove the swingarm, rear wheel, center stand, and brake pedal. Both the swingarm pin and rear axle must have been put on by the same sasquatch that did the drain bolt, because they were a bitch to get off. I could understand tightening hardware to that extent if this was a Harley, but it's a 200cc Honda. It's not going to vibrate so badly that it all falls apart.

At any rate, the swingarm pin had no lubrication on it what-so-ever. Good start. The rear axle was quite similar. With the rear wheel and swingarm off, the center stand and brake pedal were next on the hit list. There is a hollow axle/pin that runs through the pedal and center stand. Once I took the cotter pin and bolt off the end, I started to tap it out. It move a bit and then froze. Then I hit it harder. No dice. It seems that many years of sitting on the center stand had bent the pin just enough to make it not want to come out.

To keep it short, there was a lot of hammering involved. I got in far enough that I could get the brake pedal off, but I still had a long way to go for the center stand. After a while, I needed a break from that area, so I moved on to the front end.

I had already removed the front end once, so it wasn't a big deal the second time. I wanted to take the triple tree off this time. I had intended on changing the stem bearings anyway, but this only enforced my decision.

I wanted to try and clean up the frame a bit, since I'm going to be painting it first. It looks like it had a bunch of spots painted with a brown paint a one point. Probably to cover up some rust spots. There are a lot of areas that are going to need some serious sanding.

The tires were going to have to come off so that I can replace the spokes and paint the wheels, so I removed the rear sprocket, brake assembly, and one of the bearings.

The other bearing isn't going to be as easy to remove. There is some kind of dust cover that goes over it that is going to have to be removed before I can knock it out. There isn't any instruction for removing wheel bearings in the service manual ("you'll never have to change those..."), so rather than just try and force it out, I'm going to leave it for now and do some interweb research.

The front wheel has a similar situation, only I can tell that the dust cover needs to be unscrewed. It looks like I need some kind of specific tool to take care of it. Hopefully I can locate a tool that will do the job.

Yesterday, I got back to the center stand with a new strategy.

Killin' is my business. And business is...well, slow. This is a recession after all.

I bow to no sponsors, but my Rockwell SoniCrafter really kicks ass. Whether you're cutting through steel pins or buffing aluminum, it has the power and the versatility to get the job done. Dear Rockwell, please send me as many free accessories as possible.

Once that was over with, brought the frame to the shop to pressure wash the frame and dismount the tires from the rims. At this point, I had made a royal mess of my workspace again, but I really didn't feel like cleaning up. Onward.

Organization is the key to success.

I wanted to make some things shiny, so I took a few minutes (maybe it was an hour) to use the wire wheel on some parts. Its amazing what that thing will do to aluminum and rusty steel. I hit one of the forks, front sprocket cover, and top triple clamp. Amazing.

Still pitted, but not rusty.

Krylon touch paint job. Gone.

Why they painted that silver, I have no idea.

One of the parts that I had originally intended on changing was the kick starter. I REALLY wanted that to be functional since that's one of my favorite parts about these old bikes. It's an internal part, so I wasn't going to get into it yet. However, I found a used kick start assembly on Ebay (the first I've seen so far) so I though I'd look into it.

All the screws on the engine case were loosened already since they're being replaced (no more stripped-out philips head screws), so I started in on the motor. Again, there are no specific instructions in the manual for replacing the kick start (I'm starting to think I should get a Honda service manual), so I just started taking things apart.

Now I can add gaskets to my list of parts to buy.

The left side came off much easier than the right. Once both sides were off, I quickly realized that in order to get into the kick start mechanism, I would have to completely disassemble the motor. The motor is not something that I had originally intended on taking apart. External parts are one thing, but internal components are kind of a handful. Granted, if I'm going to do it, a nice small motor like this is probably the one to do it on. But I wanted to get this done in a relatively quick fashion, and an engine rebuild is not the way to do that.

So that's where I'm at. Decisions, decisions. More to come.