Nice Rack
Since I now go for rides with my son Leonard, I was looking around for a passenger grab bar for him.
I found johnakay on the sundial forum. He is a gentleman from the UK who makes excellent looking reproduction of suzuki racks. I settled on the full rack rather than just a grab bar and ordered it from John.
It came in the mail yesterday and it is a beauty. Probably nicer than what you could get from Suzuki back in the days.
I just installed it and if I say so myself, it looks fantastic.
I had to remove the signal mounting bracket thingy and the original parking handle. Ill have to find a way to not loose these for the future owners of the bike.
Before
after
Take off
Tire swap
I had the wrong tire fitted to the front wheel and I finally got around to change it. The current tire was too wide and the tread design just didn’t look right for a 70’s bike. I manage to source a duro tire in the correct, and now rare, size of 3.00-19 with a perfectly vintage design.
I also changed the fork oil as it was getting quite bouncy. The bike feels quite a lot nimbler in corners.
A little bit of paint
I kept looking at that triple tee and those scuffed up control and it was time to do something about it. Here comes the Rustoleum. I baked the paint for a few hours for additional durability. At the same time I rebuilt the master cylinder that was filled with grimy sludge. I also painted a few odd pieces that were worn out like the seat pan, battery basket and toolbox.
Before:
D
During:
After:
She Lives!
I just got back from a short trip to brazil saturday and I was itching to get back to the two girls in my life, Takami and Suzie.
Takami gave me a hand and we started wrenching away. After synchronizing the carbs and the oil pump (easy enough), we installed the instrument cluster. Connecting all the electrical connectors was simpler than I expected. I usually dread any electrical work but with the help of Takami and the wiring diagram this went smooth and we didn’t even blow a fuse.
Last came the gas tank and fuel line. After a few mishaps like installing the petcock backwards, i siphoned some gas from the harley and she was ready to go.
She started after 3 kicks! I was pretty impressed considering I have not yet done a proper ignition timing.
The smell, the sound… A thing of beauty!
I have to baby those new pistons for a while but I can tell the engine feels strong and runs smooth.
Now I have to get her plated and insured and take her out for a ride 😀
Yikes!
That was easy!
Petcock installed backwards...
You can almost smell it
Candy
All the sheetmetal has been dropped at Connery custom paint to get a whole new paint job. I am going for an improvement of the stock look. Basically same colour and pattern as the original but better paint (candy) and the yellow/white swoosh will be painted instead of the vinyl graphic of the original. The job includes sandblasting, prime, silver base and clear blue candy coat-yummy!I am restoring to be as close to stock as possible but I don’t mind improving on the factory specs when required.
The paint just looks awesome. It’s quite difficult to do it justice in a photo but the depth of the paint and the richness of the blue is just spectacular!
Sandblast
Primed
Silver
Candy
Swoosh
Tada!
News from the shine men
Ok so this morning I went to the polishing depot to shoot some video and take a bunch of pictures as they work on the last of my parts. I went there for 7:00 Am saturday morning wich is pretty early even by my standards. These guys are hard core and start typicaly between 4 and 5. The shoot went great and I have about 20 minutes of good footage that I now need to edit. I also took a series of stills. See below for the work in progress. The carburetors are going to look spectacular. Seeing the before and after, it’s hard to believe I was looking at the same pieces.
Click on images for hirez.
Red carpet
Takami who is now a full time member of my restoration team is also a very fine artist. In fact you can check her work here:http://artbytakami.com/
Now this is very convenient as my tank embelms needed to be repainted. The red varnish in the letter was peeling off. Takami repainted all the letter with a red nail polish (red carpet is the colour) and it looks awesome! I could never have done such a clean job and the nail polish has just the right amount of transparency to look like the factory red. Now this makes the plack painted part look all sad and old so that will be painted next as soon as I get some goth black polish.
Polishing update
Update from the polishing depot. I went there today to see the progress. The guys were working on my parts and it pretty cool to see it done live.
As I was taking some pics we got talking and we made a deal. I will shoot a video of them polishing my carbs and showing all my shinny parts and in exchange they’ll polish my carb for free. This will be good publicity for them on their web site and I will add the video to this blog as well. Now that’s what I call a win win situation!
Aluminium and paint
I called the polishing shop today to see if my parts were ready as promised.It was not ready yet. I’ll drop by tomorrow to give them the pistons and see how it’s going.
That got me into a polishing mood and I decided to take off the oil pump cover that I forgot to bring to the polishing shop and give it a try by hand. I have a can of mothers aluminium polish lying around. It worked quite well though it’s no mirror and it took a lot of elbow grease. Now I know why this work isn’t cheap.
before
After
Takami, my awesome fiance also got involved and waxed the tank and side panels to see if we can work with the original paint. We also took off the emblems as the red varnish is peeling off and we are going to try to repaint it with nail polish. The side panels came out really nice. The tank is a bit too rough for my taste. The paint has many little cracks from sun damage and a variety of small chips as well as some surface pitting. I need to get some paint quotes. As for the emblem we’ll try repainting; new ones are very pricey.
wax on
Wax off
Gauges cleanup
Ok so after dismantling things for a while, it’s time to reverse the trend and start rebuilding.
I went to buy one those 3M headlight polishing kit. It works quite well but its somewhat messy. My advice if you ask the girlfriend to help you is make sure she wears an apron! The results are surprisingly good for a do it yourself kit. It doens’t remove the microscopic cracks in plexy of course but it definitely restore gloss and transparency. I also used some armorall on the black plastic shell to make the whole unit look a lot newer.
before
After
Off to the shine man
I dropped off 11 pieces of metal at the polishing depot today. http://www.polishingdepot.com
In 2 weeks I should have a very shiny bunch of engine parts. This includes the top end. They will hone the cylinders at the same time. The guy did a bit of work on some cooling fins for me while I waited, it was spectacular, night and day. I was hoping to get the carbs polished but that is just too costly.
Air filter boot trouble
So my air filter intake boot, the rubber thing that plugs into the 3 pipes, was damaged. One of the carb side inlet has been squished and worn out so it wont attach correctly. I got a used air filter ,on ebay from a 74 bike. It was quite dirty but in good shape. I spent a good while cleaning that boot up, waxing it and eventually found out it doesn’t fit. Dam it the 73 and 74 parts are a little bit diferent size on the large inlet that connect to the filter. Now I know. I have to sell that 74 part on ebay again and source a 73. On the other hand I cleaned the filter good and gave it a good oiling.
Messed up boot
74 filter
Cleaned up boot
73 and 74
Gauges
The gauges work fine and are overall in OK shape but the lenses are very yellowed. Also while disconnecting a spaghetti of wires in the headlight I noticed that the shell is quite rusty. I will have to repaint that. As for the lenses I heard on various blogs about a 3M headlight lens restoration kit that is supposed to work wonder. We`ll see.
Pipes
Did a good scrubbing on the mufflers. The chrome is still in good shape and I don`t think I`ll need to re chrome.
Ready to shine.
Well after a day of tear down I now have a bunch of tarnished metal that is ready to get polished.
Day 1
So my plan is to get the bike in near new condition. This will take some time and is likely to end up like one of these government projects, over budget and delayed several times.
Luckily the bike is almost complete and runs. She doesn’t run well but she started and could almost hold a decent idle.
I decided to start by tearing down everything that needed to be polished re chromed or painted. As I take things off I get a better look at the inside to see what should be fixed in there.
First I got the tank off to get a better view of the engine and electricals.
Now the Ram air scoop comes off. This was very oxidized. The head is also looking mighty chalky. The plugs looked OK but the center plug was loose.
Next thing is the clutch cover. There is a nice oil leak coming from the kick start oil seal so this had to come off. This reminded me of how much of a PITA these japanese screws are. These dam JIS screws get chewed up by a Phillips driver in no time. I had to take a brake, go to Atlas tools on queen and get an impact screwdriver to save the day. Eventyaly all 9 screws came off. The clutch and all internal looked good. The bold on the right end of the crankshaft looked like it had been serviced ad some point.
I was on a roll so after removing the mufflers, I got onto removing the alternator anf the chain cover. Not problems here.
Yan's GT380 
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