After more than a year of doing absolutely nothing with the project, I am finally back in the garage :) I had the engine and crankcases bead blasted last year, but they weren't very careful and I had glass dust in every screw hole and gap you could imagine. This has meant me spending numerous hours cleaning the damn things with a small toothbrush and a cotton bud - meh

Nice clean rocker box

The guts of the engine

Crankcases quickly put together to see how it all looks...

...and it looks very nice indeed!

Rainy Days

'I love it when a plan comes together', or at least I love it when I try something out and it works. For example, the home made tool for getting the damper out of the fork tube (though I can't take any credit for ingenuity, that all goes to the chaps on the SR500 Forum pages). It has been a great weekend, plenty of time in the garage due to the crappy weather, and whenever I wasn't up to my elbows in grease, there was football to be watched! Lovin' it!

Ahem, for starters...a lovely polished triple clamp



Followed by a side serving of shiny calipers



And a cylinder head.



Midway through dismantling the forks.



Forks completely disembowlled, with special damper tool in the middle.




Stripping the chipped clear coat off of the lower fork legs, ready to be polished and have a new clear coat applied.



My first view of the heart of the beast, a bit nervous at what I might find.



And to my huge relief, everything was intact and the bore was as smooth as a cuban pimp. Now I just need to clean out the carbon deposits and check the gaps on the cylinder wall. Looks like the smoke in the exhaust when I first kicked the bike over was residual oil/old gaskets/or wrong carb/valve settings. The piston looks nice after a good buffing



The next stage...tbc

Check out the new background! Nice to keep things fresh :D

I have been umming and ahhing about what colour I want to do the wheels on the bike. I thought that leaving them as they were was a bit boring, and stripping them down to the alloy was a bit too BMW (eughhhh!). So I think I might go with a nice retro-cream finish with the tank decals the same colour. Also, I saw a bike with the same original seat/tail combination and thought that looked a bit crap, so I have re-done the image with a nicer seat and a new lamp. What do you think?

Back to the frontline :)

Was a fairly productive weekend, managed to find all the engine covers from under the piles of junk, and set about giving them a clean. When the wife asked where I was heading I replied, 'I'm off to the garage to give my bits a good rubbing, hehe'. Joking aside though, there really is nothing more satisfying than taking a dirty piece of metal and making it shine till you can see your reflection in it!

Before...




introducing: the beast...




and after...




stripping the clamps



'I'm so shiny, look at me shine!'




The only way to replace all the elbow grease needed for polishing - a nice cold beer :)

It has been a very long, cold and hard winter, but the snow is melting and the flowers are a-bloomin'. Nearly time to get back into the garage now that the temperature is above -5°!! Plus, the motorcyclists are already out and about which is making me want to get on with the project. I ordered some new forks and a swingarm which I received a while ago, so now I can think about getting some stuff powder coated. Then there is the engine strip down to be getting on with (which I shall be approaching with much trepidation). I'll try and get some more photos up soon.

I don't think I mentioned that I ran into a major obstacle with the swingarm bolt. The bolt itself rotates within a metal sleeve within the swingarm pivot and with bearings at both ends. I knew from reading about similar projects that the SR500 swingarm bolt was prone to seizure and that there were a number of methods for removing the bolt. Well, I tried all of them and it just didn't work - so I had to resort to cutting the whole swingarm into pieces to remove it! As dramatic as this sounds, it was bloody good fun, sparks everywhere wheeeheee :D

(oh, and in case you are wondering, that is a bread mixing machine in the background, not mine)