January 15, 2011

I finally got back to doing some work on the bike. I had my knee surgery on January 4th, then a week of recouperation, and while I'm not back 100%, I'm certainly mobile enough to get back to work on the bike.

Last month I bought wheel bearings for both wheels, so today I took the old bearings out. The front ones were really shot, but the back wheel's inner two bearings weren't too bad and the final drive bearing was shot though. So at some point the inner bearings were replaced. Not sure why the other one wasn't replaced at the same time. Regardless, I'm replacing all of them. The dust seal for the front wheel also needs replacing. I've ordered the dust seal, some black fork boots, and a swingarm bearing rebuild kit today. Once the swingarm kit is in, I can rebuild that and then I will be ready to reassemble the frame, forks and wheels. That'll get the bike looking like a motorcycle again. Also, that will be the time to start seriously looking at the engine work.

I searched high and low but could not find my container of grease, so I'll have to go get some tomorrow so I can install the bearings in both wheels. So I'm done for today.

January 17, 2011

I picked up the grease yesterday and I've got all five wheel bearings in place. Cleaned the wheel parts where I could and painted the outside pieces, as well as a few other things that just needed a fresh coat of black. Took the sprocket off while I was working on the rear wheel bearings. It was a 51 tooth sprocket. No wonder Danny said it would climb well!

Next up will be the steering stem bearings - those are the bearings that the triple tree pivots with. After that I need to wait until the swingarm bearing rebuild kit comes in. It's nice to be putting it back together!

January 19, 2011

Today I pulled the old steering stem bearings out and got the new ones in. It was a bit hard to get the bottom one off, but it finally did move. New ones are all greased up and in place with the top triple tree on as well. As soon as the new black boots get here I'll put the forks back on. I've started working on getting the swingarm bearings out, but they're really in there tight. I'll tackle it in full on the weekend.

January 22, 2011

Today the fork boots came in the mail so I decided to clean up the forks, put the new boots on, and get them put on the frame. Gee, it's starting to resemble a motorcycle now! The hard task today was to get the old bearings out of of the swingarm. One side was a real bugger to get out. I finally just switched to the other side, which came out decently. With a full opening on one side I banged on the other side for awhile until I got the bright idea to take a socket that was just a smidge smaller than the diameter of the hole. It popped right out after that. I've cleaned up the old grease out of the tube so now I'm ready to get the new bearings popped in when they arrive.

While waiting for the other bearings to come in, I've been doing a little research on tires. I was originally thinking about the Kenda K270, but I did a bit of reading on ADV Rider and a couple other sites and found that while not a bad tire, it had some oddities that made me hesitate. They were comparing it to the Shinko SR244 which has the exact same tread pattern, but the knobs seem a bit more smoothed in profile, if that makes sense. Anyways, there were lots of positive comments about it, so I checked with my local dealer, Spokane Powersports and I can get them installed and balanced for only about $24 more than I've found online. I'd install them myself, but for so little, it'll be worth my peace of mind to have the wheels balanced.

When I get the wheels back with the new tires and the swingarm bearings in, I'll get those installed on the bike. I'll get as much back on the bike as I can. I'll have to wait for more money to get some of the other parts I need. In the meantime I'll start working on the engine. There will be a fair amount of disassembly to find all the damage and get a list of parts I'll need.

January 27, 2011

Today I reassembled the swingarm with the shock absorber on the bike. It was a fairly straight-forward process. I placed the wiring harness on the bike, but have not put anything in permanent yet. There's a lot of other things to go on the bike and I'm not exactly sure where the harness should go. So as I make progress on the bike I'll figure out where the harness should be and get it in place at that time.

I'm dropping the wheels off at the motorcycle shop after work tomorrow to get the tires mounted. When they're done, I'll mount them on the bike. It'll be much easier to move it around with wheels. The one thing I've sort of forgotten is I need a new set of handlebars. I'd love to buy a nice set from Pro-taper if I could afford it, but for now I'll checkout what's available at the local used bike places. I can paint what I get and that will suffice to get it running.