Ok well I learned why the PO suggested that I should probably look into getting a new wiring harness lolololol....
I had a few spare hours to dig into the bike. My goal was to get a good starting list of things I'd need to repair, what I should order, etc. That and I wanted to start soaking the carbs today so I could finish cleaning them on Saturday. More on that later.
But first, the wiring. I popped off the side cover, which is in perfect shape by the way. No cracks or anything. And oh, what a site! This bike was definitely on FIRE at one point. All the housing was burt to a crisp and crumbled away in my hands as I touched it. Just ash remained. Pretty much all the wiring in this part of the bike is like this. What's odd is that there is no damage to the paint, side cover, frame, or even rubber component mounts! It must have been some kind of massive short that fried all the wiring and housing very quickly. I guess I won't be attempting to fire this up any time soon at this rate.
All the other wiring on the bike seems to be in great shape. It's quite flexible and clean. So I guess I could spring for a complete new harness, or try cutting the harness back till the wiring is good and just replace everything from there. I'd only do that if it was cheaper, which it probably is, but also that's inviting a lot of headaches down the road since there's no way I can splice an entire harness and not screw at least ONE connection up. I'm not sure... What would you do? I'm really not sure at this point.
From there I popped the carbs off. Wow, and I thought cb750 carbs were a pain in the ass to remove. These are even worse!! After a while I got them off and removed the float bowls. Looked like they were filled with some really rank maple syrup. The first bowl wasn't too bad, but the next three were super gummy. I couldn't' even remove the floats since the retaining pins were seized in there. I tried tapping them out but no luck, and I didnt 'want to go too hard and snap the posts. I soaked them in carb cleaner, still no good. So for now I'm leaving them off as the entire rack takes a two-day bath in 50% diluted Pine Sol, together with the petcock (which was equally gummed up).
Moving on, I inflated the 42 year old tires and they held air! Much easier to push around the shop now. But I did find four broken spokes on the rear wheel. I guess I'll have to replace them at the minimum when I put a new tire on, but should probably re-lace the whole wheel honestly.
The tank was up next. After removing the petcock for cleaning, I filled it up with the same Pine Sol solution to remove the fuel varnish. Then it's a week of white vinegar baths combined with some BBs or random bolts to break up the rust. I'll be doing that on Saturday, as well as removing the carbs from their bath and going at them with compressed carb cleaner.
I'm pretty sure this bike suffered an unfortunate fall on the left side the more I dig in. The front fender is mangled, the left headlight bracket is snapped in half, the alternator cover is scratched up, and the wiring on the left had some kind of short. Who knows if they are all related, but with only 1,941 miles on the clock, it was either one big spill or the PO spent a lot of his time falling over!
I'm still waiting on a key to arrive in the mail as well, so I can't even jerry-rig some kind of connection to the ignition system to try and turn it over when the carbs are gone. Well not without some additional creativity I suppose. So in the mean time my focus this weekend will be cleaning the *#$&#*$ outta those carbs till they're good enough to eat off of, checking the condition of the forks, attempting to remove the seat (which is locked with no key) so I can get at the wiring a bit better, and cleaning up the tank. Probably put a big order of new parts in on the weekend too.
That's the news.
