1998 Rebuild, Part Two

As of May 20th...

          The painted parts (fenders, tank, outer primary cover, rear strut covers) are at the body shop, being stripped.

          Now that the front and rear tires, wheel bearings, seals, and calipers are all set, the bike got a wash to get rid of as much crud as possible before continuing with the rebuild.

          Primary case: After the wash, I started in on the transmission; removing the clutch cable, cable mount, clutch arm, shifter arm, and then finally the transmission cover. Here's what it looked like after removing the shifter drum and end bearings.

          Then I pulled the shifter forks so I could check them for flatness and wear; as it turned out, all the transmission parts seem to be in good shape. However, I'm going to need a new shifter arm. So while I'm waiting for that...

As of May 25th...

          I went back to revisit the painted parts again; and found them further along. One of the Gloucester Auto Body technicians had taken out the five inch dent in the left side of the tank, pulled out the hollow between the left and right sides on the top of the tank, and was proceeding to smooth out the contours after applying Hessian primer to the tank.

          Since I had a set of polyurethane riser bushings in the tool box, this seemed like a good time to put them in. Little did I know... The shop that had done the original work on the bike, Pristine Cycles of Weymouth, had used GREEN Loctite on the handle bar clamp bolts! It took about an hour, and lots of propane torch time, to get them out — and even then I managed to gall one set of threads in the riser...

As of May 31st...

          I took a day to rewire the primary side of the coils; I have the RevTech single fire setup, and when I did the original installation I had only fork lugs available. So I took those off, and replaced them with the correct ring lugs. I also used only one lug per post, and it looks much better now.

          I took a day or two to do some aluminum polishing, and clean up the seats and give them a good coat of H-D leather dressing. I took the rectifier off and cleaned it, making sure that I had a good, clean ground between the rectifier case and the frame. I've heard of a number of bikes that stopped running because of bad grounds between the frame and the rectifier case.