Rolling Chassis!

It's back! I was so excited that I took the chassis for a spin around the cul-de-sac. As it turns out, my street is much more downhill then I ever suspected. Fortunately, the back brake (while not fully adjusted) operated enough to prevent another trip to the hospital.

While trying to figure out how to fill the forks with oil, I ran across this little gem from Walmart:



While it looks like something from a slasher flic, it's a "Flavor Injector." It has two stellar properties that I needed:

• It was accurate enough to measure the amount of oil I need to inject
• The needle part allowed me to inject the oil down in the fork itself instead of waiting for it to drain in slowly. I customized the syringe by cutting of the end, but otherwise it performed brilliantly.

Next up is finishing up the front brake. After I took the pic, I went ahead and mounted the front caliper and the brake lever. The pads and the master are in great shape, but some of the bits in-between might need some love. The bits are around 35 years old, so it's a wonder any of it works at all.

What the Fork?

Ok, so I thought I was going to work on the frame next. Well, I was trying to order some parts to rebuild the forks with, but unfortunately the guys at Honda weren't entirely sure which parts I would need. They recommended that I break down the forks to see what they had. The old exploded images of parts aren't entirely clear, so they wanted to be sure they were getting me the right stuff.

I felt inspired last night, so I went to work on the forks for the bike. Well, one of the forks anyway. What I've found out so far is that it takes longer to degrease / clean up what I'm working on that it does to actually do what I set out to do.

For example, I had hoped to take both forks apart so that I knew exactly what to order. Well, I didn't get either fork apart. I spent the whole evening just cleaning up one fork.

Here's what I started with:


And here is what I ended up with after much scrubbing, brushing, power drill work, etc:



It's not factory or anything, but it looks a lot better than it did when I started. The hardest part was getting the nasty inspection sticker off. It had been on there since 05. Underneath the inspection sticker were all sorts of dings from years of abuse. When I get this on the road, I'll add one of those cool flaps of metal to put the stickers on.

I did manage to drain the remaining fork oil out (there wasn't much left). I'll get to use my handy-dandy ring-clip pliers to take these bad boys apart.