Home stretch

Soon...Very soon.

I've been looking everywhere for these.  I should have started at my favorite bike shop in the first place.  The Ottawa Goodtime Center hasn't let me down yet. 

 Now I have a good battery terminal, nice and permanent.

I've oiled up the pod filters.

I've got a question for you.  Does anyone know what these nipples, tee hee, are on my carbs?  Larry's, ptouie, bible of carbs doesn't mention them at all. 

Here are the goodies I've been waiting for.  I bought a set of bars and a brake master from Dime City Cycles and a custom Spiegler brake line from Moto Madness.

Sorry about the tuft of hair in the bottom of the last picture, I haven't had the time to shave my toes in a while.  Anyhow, cool stuff right. 

I took the old bars off and man are those grips hard to take off.  I tried it dry and broke a sweat.  Once I added a specially formulated ancient recipe lubricant it came off easy.

Ok, so the lubricant you see on the end of the grip is actually butter.  Shut up, it worked great.



Here it is with the new bars.

I don't know how comfortable they'll be but they sure look dope.   They fit the bike better aesthetically.

I lost the little thingamajig that holds the cables near the fender.  I've seen it at least a dozen times during the winter but now that I want it I can't find it.  No problem, made my own.

 I'll paint it black and you won't notice it unless you really look.

Soon Mr. Double J will help me get this thing out of my house and bring it to work.  There we'll fire it up and hopefully safety it.

 I hope it runs Ok, fingers and furry toes crossed.

Bad brakes

You've got to be kidding me, more snow.  It's almost April and we just got dumped on.

The top of that shelter was clear last night.

My brake master is not pumping fluid.  I tried to bleed them this week and got nowhere.

No problem, I have some goodies coming...

Enough winter allready

Still waiting...

It was -14 Celsius with a wind chill of -24, that's 7 Fahrenheit with a chill of   -11 F.  We just got about 10cm of snow.  No mater haw many cans of hair spray I go through I still can't get this global warming thing to happen fast enough.


I changed the final drive fluid with some of the purple stuff.  I haven't used it before, I'm more of an Amsoil guy, but the stuff was sitting on the shelves at work for years so I grabbed a bottle and gave myself an awesome deal.

I've bought a pair of Icon Elsinore boots,

I'll let you know what I think of them.

It's now a waiting game...

Details

Now that it's too late for this season I don't have much to do but tinker with the details.  I've painted the Honda emblem black, a nice dark touch. 

I've used some copper wire instead of zip ties to hold some of the wiring.

I made a conduit for the wires going to the license out of copper tubing.  It has to be bent just so.  It will probably be strapped to the drive shaft tunnel with copper wire as well.

I'll have to figure out how to Finnish that last bit nicely

The fancy fuel filter I bought is too big, I'll ditch it for a smaller not as nice one.

And here's the bike mostly done, like I said, just details.

Nice photobomb Chico.

Finally the paint is done.  After lashing the tank down to an inch of its life,  the last tank I buffed ended up flying across the room, I gave it a good buff.  It turned out nice. 

I also polished the gas cap and cover.

You can see the lace pattern better when I use the flash, the colour is off though, it's more like the other photos.

I played with the seat so that it would latch correctly, now it snaps on like a dream.

I slapped the new petcock on, nice and shinny.  The old one was a mess.

A couple more shots just for the hell of it. 

Superdog's a blur,  I hope he leaves my drapes alone.

I gave brazing a shot, it might come in handy latter.  I like the contrast of the metals.

No more electrical issues

I don't know why the last stretch of a project is always the longest.  Maybe you get lazy, maybe frustrated.  Maybe you kept for last the stuff you dislike the most.  Either way winter is coming and this bike still isn't done. 

I had assumed things about this project that got me into trouble.

Firstly, I assumed that I had amber running lights at the front of this thing.  I was very sure and this is why we kept blowing fuses left right and center.  It turns out that the stock front ambers had only two wires.  That means no running lights.  *^%#@ me. 

And B,  I assumed that a white wire is hot and a black wire is ground.  Apparently Chinese LEDs use whatever wires they feel like so the opposite was true.

Mr. G paid me a visit and his methodical ipso facto approach to this was more fruitful than my swear, yell and plead approach was. 

Once these two facts where known the rest fell into place.  We did have a "what the @#$" moment when I connected only one wire to a stock lamp I was using for troubleshooting and the damn thing lit up.  I looked at Mr. G with the other wire in hand and once again swore.  The look on his face was worth it.  After a second or two of  what the @#$^% we figured out the body of the lamp was grounding on the rad support.  Freaking vintage stuff made of metal. 

Some crappy wiring had to be fixed.  I'm nor comfortable with stuff like this:

The wires to the battery box got lengthened.

Now everything works like it should.