Fellow geezers will remember the lyrics to the Gilligans Island TV show theme... where they went for a "three hour tour" and ended up stranded on that fake desert island. Well this "little weekend project" has blossomed and ballooned morphed into a far bigger deal than I estimated... by a lot. I'm entering month 9 and am barring some error on my part or some undiscovered broken thing I missed along the way, I may actualy be nearing the end of the gestation period. I think a Labor Day Weekend inaugural ride isn't out of the question.
The back story:
(some reprinted from the new member section).
After skulking around here and cherrypicking great info from the braintrust I stopped and thought, "I wonder if this is what Al Gore had in mind when he invented the internet?"
;-)
Seriously - a great wealth of info and a huge number of good people here.
I started this project because a friend of mine had taken this bike in on trade at his shop, thought about using it as a ratbike/shop bike, but then decided it was too slow for him. So when I told him I wanted to do a resto-project (it had been a while since I've done a big project) and probably make a cafe racer, he pointed me to the snotter in the corner and the related boxes o' parts. It was pretty nasty and generally had the appearance that it must have spent most of the past 30 years (last registered in 81) at the bottom of a septic tank. We made a deal and off I went.
I spent a week cleaning it. Layers and layers of scum and hours of scrubbing... ugh. I had never worked on a bike that smelled this badly. Cars yes -- once I did an old Jag xj6 that had a noxious mix of old and new animal feces under the rear seat (whatever it was that was using the car as a toilet entered and exited via a large rust hole).
Anyway, after hours of janitorial work on this p.o.s., I determined that it would run (roughly, but ok), so I began the disassembly, the reorganization of stuff, the hours of online parts perusing and sourcing, ... those of you who've done it know what an amazing time-sucker these things can be.
And it has been a rewarding/fulfilling blast thus far.
Early on I decided that this was gonna be the first bike (or car) I was gonna do that wasn't about performance/speed. It's a cosmetic exercise mostly, with efforts being made to help with turning and stopping. Ergo I'm gonna leave the engine alone (it had 19k miles on it and while not perfect, has pretty good/even compression etc). I may someday decide to change the cam or up the bore or whatever, but for now, it just needs to run and go through the gears.
