Electric mayhem, Frozen Nuts, and Homebrew.

I've managed to tear down quite a bit more over the past two days. Exhaust, wiring harness, foot pegs, kick stand, carburetors, and front forks.

Saturday

I really wanted to get the engine out before removing the forks, but the drain bolt is frozen solid, so I couldn't drain the oil. I gave it a good PB bath, hit it with a hammer, swore at it, and even tried to use a wrench.

My arch enemy.

I think that an impact gun would most likely get the job done, but that is not on my list of current tools, so I moved on.

The wiring harness was starting to drive me nuts, so that was next to go. Unlike most never bikes, the headlight bucket is the Grand Central Station of wiring. Everything meets up in there. It's horrifying.

I managed to feed the wiring harness from the back through the frame and disconnected the clutch and tach cables. Now I'm left with a giant mess of wires and components that includes the headlight, switch housings, and gauge cluster, but at least I can stuff it in the corner and forget about it for a while.

The exhaust was simple to remove, though I still need to disconnect the mufflers from the head pipes. The mufflers are rusted through in a few spots on the bottom, but someone with a welder could probably fix them well enough. I've got lots of rust to remove on the headers, though. They'll probably end up getting painted black since there's no way to restore the original finish.

 

Saturday's handiwork.

Sunday

Today consisted of removing the tool kit, driver pegs, kick stand, and front forks. I was surprised at how much of a pain the tool kit was to remove. It's only two bolts, but the sit inside the frame where you only can fit a small 10mm wrench and move it about 1" at a time. Once it's gone, it really frees up a lot of space. 

The foot pegs and kick stand weren't a big deal other than the fact that they are covered in grease, oil, and dirt. They'll clean up nicely. It was time to move on to the front end.

For starters, I've got to get a stopper tab welded back onto the lower triple clamp because one it broken off. So now the forks swing all the way to the left and will hit the tank if left that way. The forks were covered with rubber boots and the headlight clamps, and the rust stains on the fork lowers made me nervous for what I would find when I took them off. 

Sure enough, there was plenty of rust to go around. Fortunately, not on anywhere that really matters. Once the forks were pulled, I decided that I should drain them. I'm pretty sure that one of them had water in it. There wasn't much fluid in either, and it did not look very healthy. New fork seals and fresh oil will be very nice for them. 

Fresh Honey Cream Ale. Yum.

30 year old fork oil. Not yum.

Rusty forks. 

I've started to do some polishing and cleaning to see what is salvageable. Some of the chrome parts will be getting painted anyway, so I'm not too worried them. The rear shocks will clean up nicely (I'll post pics later). Tomorrow I'm going to give the oil plug another shot.