After 50 days, 220+ non-latex gloves, a roll and a half of heavy-duty paper shop towels, countless mistakes and enough naughty words to stock a pirate ship for a year, it's done. The bike successfully roared through 27 miles of twisty, back-country mountain roads through the Oakland hills. Not bad for a $500 bike with a bad tensioner and less than $300 in parts and tools
But that's not to say that it was an easy morning.
First things first: bagels and coffee. I'm convinced that this is what kept me going.
Next, over to the shop and start the bike up. It didn't want to at first, but with some coaxing it eventually roared to life. And then died. And it did that for a bit as I got everything adjusted right, got the idle screw where it belongs, tweaked this, tweaked that, and the bike warmed up.
Then we noticed that there was still a rather unforgivable amount of rattling coming out of it. So off with the tappet covers to readjust those, and I noticed that most of them hadn't oiled up. OK, that made sense, it's a splash zone, maybe they're just making noise. No biggie, I put some oil on the tappet ends, put the covers back on, and fired it up. No difference.
So I wheeled it back in the shop, and adjusted all the tappets again. All but one of them were, in fact, out of spec. This time, I figured out that if I wiggled them as I tested the spacing, the gauges either slipped in much more easily, or clearly bound them up.
Back out, tried again. Nope, nothing. Must be the cam chain. Back in the shop.
I mucked with the tensioner for a bit, and eventually figured out that the lock nut wasn't biting down on the case at all- it was biting down on the end of the screw, where the threading ends. This prevents the lock nut from actually locking the thing, and creates a maddening scenario where you really have to crank down with a screwdriver to get it to stay in place. Aha, so that's what broke it in the first place! You can't crank it down tight enough to lock, because you're biting the screw itself, and in doing that, you're turning the screw. You literally fight yourself until something breaks- exactly what happened.
I added a washer, and it all went together very well. Boom. Noise decreased to a much more acceptable level.
But there was still a worrisome clunk coming from down in the guts occasionally. As the bike warmed up, it seemed to go away.
WARNING! HERE FOLLOWS NIGHTHAWK TALK! IF THIS OFFENDS YOU, CAN PICK UP THE CB THREAD LOWER DOWN!
Next, we took some time to get my brother's exhaust crossover fixed. This thing, at some point, rusted out and was wrecked. The former owner basically sawed it off and clamped some tin cans over it. Not clean, not effective. So my brother made a new one, which at some point got hit with some road debris and started leaking. Time to replace!
Here you can see the old crossover still in place, but the aluminum and hose clamps that held it in place already removed. Seriously rotten pipes, but a decent replacement.
We pulled the old crossover off, yanked the middle section out of it, and bent the old ends back into shape. Here it is.
If this happened to involve sawing notches into them, then so be it. We can be animals when so moved.
Then he taped it in place with some Tiger Patch (some sort of heat-activated, resin-impregnated fiberglass tape) and strapped some aluminum over it just for good measure. It's hideous, but not really visible, and seems to have worked very well.
HERE ENDS THE OFFENDING NIGHTHAWK DIGRESSION! WE PROMISE NOT TO STRAY FROM THE TOPIC ANYMORE!
In the meantime, I was monkeying around with tappets, chain tensioner, and at some point wheeled the bike up next to a vanity mirror he's restoring for his better half. I had to have the shot.
Then we decided to go for a ride, but have lunch first. Lunch was delicious.
Then, suited up in all of our gear, we wheeled the bikes to the curb, fired them up, and let them idle to warm up while we got everything strapped and buckled and buttoned and zipped up.
My bike kept making these horrible clunking noises down in the guts. We had no idea what it was, but the words "bottom end rebuild" were uttered, which is just about the last thing you want to hear after you just finished a top end rebuild. It was a sort of "tonk... tonktonktonk... tonk... tonktonk..." that seemed to be coming from the bottom right of the engine. Weird as hell.
Video with the noise loud and clear here:
http://youtu.be/d20QXuxirEcIf anyone can point me to how to embed a video, I'll be forever grateful.
Bikes on the curb and warmed up, directions on the tank... this was possibly the most frustrating moment of the past 50 days.
Then I remembered some words of wisdom my friend uttered when he sold me the bike.
First: "Think of this as a clingy girlfriend. Sometimes it just wants attention for the sake of attention."
Second: "You can tell when the timing is off. It just won't sound right. Like your favorite song played at the wrong speed."
OK, what the hell, we just mucked with the entire top end, especially the cam chain ("timing chain" in car parlance), let's check the timing just for gits and shiggles.
Yup, the timing was off. Fixed that and the clunk went away. I have no idea what it was, but it hasn't come back since.
Then we went for a glorious ride. My first ride, if you discount the occasional low-speed jaunt through city streets. We went all the way out from Oakland to Moraga through the back roads, then back and north along the ridge of the Oakland Hills all the way to the Caldecott tunnel. We stopped there for a bit and admired the low sun over San Francisco. It was a glorious, clear afternoon, and you could see the whole damn bay.
For non-locals, here's what you're looking at:
Foreground: My bike, and the shoulder of Grizzly Peak Boulevard, just south of the Caldecott tunnel (the tunnel takes the freeway east through the mountains).
Midground: the ridgeline is the Berkeley (north/right) or Oakland (south/left) hills, a richy-rich area. You can see the freeway that'll eventually go through the Caldecott at the bottom of the ridge on the left. Behind the ridge to the right is Berkeley.
Background: the flats on the left are downtown Oakland- home, sweet home. To the right is the San Francisco Bay, with the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island/Yerba Buena Island visible as a comma-shaped dark patch just to the left of the sunshine on the water.
Horizon: Dead center is the skyline of San Francisco in the distance. The tall pointy thing up on the hill is the famous radio tower (a major San Francisco landmark, and iconic of the city if you're a local, and completely unknown if you're not). The tiny spike in the middle of the water is the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the tiny spike on the beach to the right of that is the north tower. To the right of that is Marin. We're standing here:
https://maps.google.com/?ll=37.855999,-122.21175&spn=0.00141,0.00284&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=37.855912,-122.211718&panoid=z6-XtajZokEFoXDGNrNWrw&cbp=12,260.84,,0,4.5 (you can even seen the tip of that same pine tree).
And here are the two bikes, my 36 year old CB550, and my brother less-than-ten-year-old CB250 (the famous Nighthawk).
And here's a horrible picture of us glaring into the sun and trying desperately not to squint. Me on the right, my brother on the left.
Then back home, and we cleaned the shop like it hadn't been cleaned in... well, in 50 days.
Overall, the bike seems to run great now. There are still some bits and bobs that need sorting out- it's still making a rattly, scratching noise that sets my teeth on edge, but I think it's just the sort of engine it is- I've heard a few other CB550s make that noise in various youtube videos, and I've heard old Hondas make it when they go down the road, but I've never heard a well-tuned CB550 in real life, so I have nothing to compare it to. It made a weird rattling noise in the front end (I think) when I hit bumps, so I need to track that and tighten whatever bolt that is. I want to put the front fender braces back on. I want to paint the sidecovers to match the tank stripe (they're shiny black plastic aftermarket ones). The tires are ten years old, and even though I've had a dealer/mechanic tell me they're still good ("no cracks, plenty of tread left, good and sticky") but they're... well, ten years old. I don't think we broke 50 today, and most of the curves were 25-35 miles per hour. Things like that.
And finally, there's the old tensioner in the wast bucket, next to the egg carton that faithfully held my valves in order and the second 100-count box of non-latex gloves we went through. We used the last pair to decant the old oil back into the jugs it came from for recycling.
