Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines… If You Can.
It's been a while since work began on the CBR, but we got around to messing about with it some more.
After changing the forks out, we'd been trying to (unsuccessfully) start the engine. This meant one very drained (and then recharged) battery, lots of huffing and puffing as we pushed the bike around the garage and quite a bit of swearing and kicking as she failed to fire.
What we should have done was turn the fuel tap off during storage and drain the carbies when she was just sitting around. Unfortunately, in our sheer laziness we didn't, and it turns out we would've had to pull the carbies in order to drain them anyway as the drain screws for the centre two carbies face each other with no way to get a screwdriver in there. Lesson learnt.
So after several failed attempts at getting her to fire (and with a few backfires and the heavy smell of petrol in the garage), we pulled the tank, airbox and carbies to have a look at the jets. Blocked. Full of crap. I took my time with them. Sliders were a bit gunky, and it was apparent that no one had pulled the carbies in a long time.
What was perhaps worrying for me was the presence of a random hose which was connected to another random box (about the size of two matchboxes) and then went, well, nowhere. I looked at it wondering what the hell sort of purpose it could serve.
Turning the engine over a bit to get some vacuum to refill the carbies with fuel sent the battery almost to death, so cutting our losses, we push started it and on the second or third push, she finally coughed back to life. She's pulling a bit to the right, although that may be my imagination since there was no right rear set, and she's running a bit rough. A proper carb balance will need to be done eventually and an oil change is definitely required before she gets any higher revs.
After quite a few weeks, we've reached the next milestone in getting her back on the road. With a bit of care, hopefully that'll be soon!
Coughing Life Back Into the CBR
Well, we went around to try and get the CBR started last night with mixed results.
There was a simple issue of re-routing a choke cable and then we tried starting her... With less than impressive results. With the bike sitting for almost a year, the battery had lost most of its charge and cranking it didn't do much to help it.
To be honest, a lot of the time was spent sitting around waiting for the battery to get some charge, but once it had a few hours in it we decided to try and start her up again. With again, less than impressive results. As the battery started to die, we figured we might as well try to push start her and it was here that she coughed up the faintest bit of life, and then promptly died again. So she ran for a few seconds after we'd been pushing her all over the garage, which is fairly good considering her carbs probably need to be cleaned right out and the fuel drained.
Sitting around a bit out of breath, we were discussing what to do about the rest of her once she was running. She needed to be roadworthy in order to be registered and that meant she'd need at least the front cowling for mirrors and to cover any jagged edges. I'm thinking a front end Tyga conversion, but money is a serious consideration as well.
Fork Change
Got around to changing the forks on dwiffy's bike last night.
It's actually a lot easier than I thought. We removed the forks a few days ago, but didn't have a 30mm wrench or socket to remove the top of the triple clamp. Once we got that off, it's a matter of gently tapping the top of the triple clamp off, unthreading the clamps below that and pulling out the rest of the triple clamp from below.
In dwiffy's accident, the front forks and the bottom of the triple clamp were bent and the rim was cracked, so all of them had to be replaced. The replacement wheel was actually balanced pretty well, but the alignment may need to be checked. We'll see.
Installation of the new triple clamp and forks was pretty simple and if we didn't spend so much time dicking around with the ignition, we probably could have done the whole replacement in about an hour. Doing things slowly and surely is the way, though. It's simply a matter of tapping the top clamp back on (that 30mm threaded nut will hold it in place once on), feeding the forks up and tightening it all up in about four places. It's made me realise that motorcycles are actually really simple.
The axle is a two person job, unless you want to balance it on your foot, and has a few spacers on either side to stop the wheel from wobbling about once it's on. We greased her up pretty good, but despite that, we had to gently tap the axle in for a snug fit. I was a little concerned that there was no cotter pin on one side of the axle, but given the axle is held in place through four separate bolts on the underside of the forks, it's not going to go anywhere any time soon.
The brake calipers were a bit of a pain in the ass as during transportation, we'd squeezed the brakes a few times when they were off the rotors. Perhaps I'm missing something, but from what I've read people have seemed to have always just pushed the pistons back into their seats with their hands. I can never seem to do this and always have to end up clamping the back of the pads or using a screwdriver for leverage. I found out that the pads also weren't installed correctly by the previous owner, so we fixed those at the same time. It's a little worrying after finding out one of your brake pads could jump out.
There are still a lot of little things that need to be fixed, but at least it's back on two wheels now and no longer on the jack. In the next session, we'll be trying to get her started and seeing what we need to tackle first in order to get her roadworthy again.
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