Yellow '76: Getting Some Sun

[Lucien Harpress]

So, simple plan was to do a quick-and-dirty clean and mask job on the rear caliper, hit it with some spray-bomb caliper paint, and call it good. Thing is, I immediately ran into a couple things that scuttled that plan:

-The rear brake as a whole unit can't actually fit if the gas tank or muffler is installed (you can't run the swingarm down low enough to get the MC in place)

-The rear caliper had already been painted at some point, so the pins holding the brake pads in place were hopelessly wedged, so I couldn't pull the pads to mask the caliper properly.

So, since I was replacing the fluid anyway, I split the caliper from the line, cleaned and installed the MC on the bike (capping the brake line off on the caliper side with an acorn nut the correct size, of all things), and started tackling the caliper properly.



The retainer pins were a literal pain in my backside. I started with industrial-strength penetrating oil on the outside part, and eventually moved on to splitting the caliper itself.



Even then getting them removed required heat and a large hammer, and required me to bend them back straight after I'd gotten them out. On the plus side, I can clean up the gunk and garbage much easier now.

Plan is to get them cleaned and painted tomorrow, and get the whole back end of the bike finished 100% in a day or two.

[desertrefugee]

I had forgotten you were going to detail the brakes. Good stuff. But my question is, where are the heck do you find the time to get all this done?

When I was still working, I would spend late evenings in the shop if the temperatures out there were habitable, and weekend time, and I still don’t think I got done as much as you do. Kudos for that.

My neighbor, who is an ex-Vietnam vet, used to complement me regularly about my choice of music in the evening. My shop is large with great acoustics and I have a killer sound system out there. Luckily, our parcels here are large enough that by the time sound drifted back towards his patio/deck it was not overly offensive. He certainly would’ve said so if it was. Lucky for me because I do have a tendency to crank up the volume.

I cannot pick up a screwdriver without having some tunes on.

[Lucien Harpress]

But my question is, where are the heck do you find the time to get all this done?

I credit my staggering lack of a social life.

In all honesty, I'm lucky enough to have a job that gets me out at 2PM, so I've got a decent chunk of sunlight to get a lot of this stuff done. And especially recently I've had a number of things queued up over the winter, just waiting for the weather to break to actually install them. Hence the large number of updates in a relatively small period of time.



I don't always pop on the radio when I'm working, but when I do I'm one of those weird NPR guys. (What? They run some cool stuff on the weekends!)

[CYBORG]

i listen to NPR in my shop as well

[Lucien Harpress]

Whelp, caliper paint was good enough, and I figured it would look better on the bike as opposed to sitting on the bench, so... well, here we are.











A couple of things:

-I still have the bleed the rear brake. I gotta psyche myself up for that. I bleed brakes about as well as I fix KZ1300s....

-Although the rear caliper is painted, I still need to add the most important part- the red (inspection?) dot. It's necessary.

-This is the first time the bike is completely together since I started a year and a half ago. Some winter project, huh?

-I wondered why the bike smoked like a chimney every time I started it up. Then I remembered I protected the inside of the gas tank after I cleaned the rust out by using 2-stroke oil. Most of which is still in there...

-I'm going to be on long-term lookout for a fairly pristine set of fenders. The front is mostly good, but has a large dent in the center, and while the rear looks good in the visible areas, under the seat it's pretty rough, and the chrome is starting to bubble in quite a few places. This can wait though.

Despite being together, it won't be like this for long. I've got a leaky front caliper, so I plan on rebuilding both. At the same time I'll be attempting to polish the fork lowers. I'll have to take them off the bike, but hopefully not disassemble them. I don't see why it shouldn't work.

[Lucien Harpress]

You know, I love Honda, and other days I hate Honda.

Well, "hate" is a strong word. More like "perplexed". I turned my attention to my front calipers, or at least the left one for the moment. Not only do I love the fact that it's completely different from the rear caliper (only one piston vs the rear two, probably because there's two calipers on the front, etc.), and that it's built like an auto caliper with slide pins and whatnot. No, my favorite part comes when it's time to remove the piston.



Why NOT design a system that requires you to split the caliper (with GIANT allen bolts that are guaranteed to be seized), all because the piston is the barest minimum too long to get out otherwise?!



I do kid, of course. I mean, it is annoying, but also, I managed to get it apart without too much trouble, so there's that. The good news is that I've got both piston seals ready to go. The bad news (maybe)?



I noticed this nick/dent into the piston. It looks pretty far back to be the cause of my caliper leak, but now that I've got it apart, I'd be a bit of a fool to not replace it, just in case. I'll hold off until I break down the other caliper, just to be sure I don't need two of them, but it's still a bummer when you expected to be done buying parts. Ah well.

[Lucien Harpress]

As much as I'm usually dealing with rusty, cruddy parts, it's kinda nice to have fresh new parts to play with.





These calipers are still goofy as all get-out, though.



I've still got to pull the other side, then most of the front end comes apart to polish the forks and clean up some of the front blinker wiring.

[Lucien Harpress]

UPDATE: Yeah, it's glad I'm going through brakes.

[Lucien Harpress]

Bit of a small setback. Well, less of a setback and more of a "pain in my butt I didn't want to have to deal with, but okay I will". Caliper work is proceeding surprisingly smoothly- despite looking uglier, the paint on the right caliper seems to be in much better shape than that of the left, so less I have to scrape off when I repaint them. I figured I'd pull the forks, get them ready for polishing, and have them be ready when the front brakes were done.

The problems hit when I jacked up the front end and ran the handlebars back and forth. Almost immediately I got the telltale notching sensation of bad steering head bearings.

Now, I've done them before, so it's nothing new. And this is by far the best time to get them done. But I'm not looking forward to tearing apart the ENTIRE front end, and I'm getting tired of buying parts. In any case, I'll thank myself later, I'm sure.

UPDATE: In an absolute freak bit of serendipity, I bought a set of steering head bearings for my CB750 about 6 months ago, knowing that bike needed them as well. As it turns out, the early CB750s run the EXACT SAME BEARINGS as the early GL1000s. Still a pain in the butt, but at least I'm not waiting on parts.

[Lucien Harpress]

(sigh) And it looked so nice, too...

[desertrefugee]

Hey Lucien, excellent progress on this beast. Really looking good and you are well aware obviously but attention to detail is what sets one apart. We’ve talked about that a lot in this thread.

Regarding brake calipers, brake components and red dots. I’ve heard it said before and have seen it confirmed on the number of Honda components… I don’t remember if it was Goldwing or not… That the red coloring was on the caliper before the black went down. It was not a dot that was applied later. They masked the red probably with a sticker, and then paint the calipers black before peeling the sticker off. Can anyone confirm this? I don’t think this matters since you’re not doing a concourse restoration, but for anyone who might be, it might matter. (Just like scribbles on the firewall of a 69 challenger would be significant.)

[Lucien Harpress]

Yeah, that bit I can confirm- the red was painted first, then masked off and the black added later. A lot of old paint flaked off a couple of the calipers as I was cleaning them, and the red extended under the black quite a bit. In my case I'll be putting the red back on, but I'm not ornery enough to do it "correctly". I'm just going to splash a bit on top. Besides, two of the three calipers are already painted.

[Lucien Harpress]

Well, steering head bearings are done. As usual, they were a pain in the butt, but I'm getting quite good at doing them now. Not sure if that's a skill I wanted exactly, but here we are.







On the upside, the old loose ball bearings are gone and replaced with modern tapered roller bearings. The only downside it that it seems whenever I do this, for whatever reason the triple trees end up ever so slightly farther apart, in the neighborhood of less than 1mm. Now, the forks and triple tree doesn't care, but the headlight ears end up with a bit of vertical play they didn't have before. The same thing happened on my KZ1300, and I'll probably have to end up doing what I did for that one, and add in some o-rings as spacers.

[Lucien Harpress]

Still waiting on brake parts, so I took a look at my front forks. They are pitted REAL bad on the fronts, and have always brought down the look of the whole bike. I ran a first pass on one of them, and while I'm not sure if I'm completely done with it yet, it certainly is an improvement.

[Lucien Harpress]

I'm still waiting on parts for the other front caliper (no mail on Memorial Day), and I need to freshen up on the correct sequence on front end assembly, bleed the brakes and do a quick tune/sync, but you know what?

Things are starting to look kinda pretty.