Back in the garage - at last!

Well, lost a couple of weekends there, the lawns needed mowing, I got lazy etc etc. But I was back in the garage for about 4 hours on Saturday.

In other news, before we start, a friend of ours who owed us some money gave us some of his gardening and related equipment that he has no further use for, for us to sell on eBay or keep or whatever. One of the items included was a little electric air compressor. Very useful, even though it's only currently got a tyre inflating attachment. I'll be learning all about air tools sometime soon!
We've also gained a petrol lawnmower that just needs it's height adjuster mechanism fixing & that'll be ready to roll, so hopfully mowing the lawns should only take an hour rather than the half a day it currently takes with the poxy little electric flymo thing we currently have - can't complain about that too much though, it was inherited from my parents when they patioed their little bit of lawn.
We've also now got a slightly rusty beaten-up transit van with no MoT or tax on it, to get rid of... That's definitely an eBay job! I might even post a link to the listing in here when I get around to doing the eBay thing...

Anyway on to the bike... Finally managed to get that last piece of rear mudguard off (by breaking the bolt). I wasn't intending to break the bolt, it just kinda happened, a combination of years of rust and the brute-force-n-ignorance approach. I'm likely to be replacing most of the bolts anyway, certainly those kind of little ones, so it's no biggie.

Gave up on the brake caliper, the lengthy bleeding process didn't seem to have worked, so I bagged everything up and will re-visit it if I REALLY need the caliper at the end of the project... Six months in a bag of oil will do it no end of good... Or something. There'll be a new seal kit required anyway.

Had to cheat horribly to get the rear sprocket away from the plastic guard. The Haynes manual did it's usual trick... "Remove the sprocket and housing from the bike and separate them..." No clue as to how this was supposed to be achieved. I guess mine was just rusted together again, like the gearchange shaft on the engine casing. But the housing is plastic! Anyway, as the housing was already damaged in a different carelessness with a hammer accident, I just broke it up and dremelled the last bit off. I was hoping to learn how to do it nicely, for the other two times, but no such luck. I didn't find any retaining mechanism as such, so perhaps it was just rust.

Got the swing-arm off, that was really easy. But I'm having a dilemma about the swing-arm bushes. I'm going to have to remove them if I get the swing arm powder coated, but according to the Haynes manual they're very very difficult to re-fit without presses etc. I do have a friend who has a workshop so he might be able to do that for me when the time comes.

Then I attacked the forks. Hmm, they're going to be a job of work to get out. They've basically rusted in to the clamps. I've completely removed the two pinch bolts, taken off the two bolts at the top & removed the springs & fork oil (all over the floor - I'll explain how later...) but even after soaking in WD40 for an hour or so they still weren't budging. So I've done my usual trick with them, given them a good coating of WD and left them to think about their crimes...

Got the centre stand off, that's a nice piece of engineering with the sleeve cut away on the one side to allow lateral movement on the shaft for removal. Very sweet. Took me a couple of minutes to wiggle it in the right direction but ultimately an easy job.

Got the footrest bar off, again a piece of cake with enough WD40... I'm going to turn into a walking advert for that stuff if I don't watch myself. But it is bloody good stuff. At this point some wise-arse is going to say that there are even better products available, yes, I know. But Halfords don't sell them... And I'm too lazy to go shopping anywhere else, although there is a pretty good car accessory/parts/workshop type shop over in St Albans that I really should pay a visit to, or even one in Hatfield sometime when I go to the Farmer's Market there.

To get the centre stand and footrest bar off I had to turn the frame upside down, fairly obviously. I had earlier tried to take the forks apart, so instead of putting the bolts back in the tops of the forks I decided this would be as good a time as any to get the springs and oil out. I laid a couple of clean rags on the floor & put the springs on them (weeny little springs!) then I put a couple of other rags down where I was planning to put the heads of the forks (there's nothing else left on the headstock you see). Unfortunately I forgot that the oil would start coming out as soon as the forks passed through the horizontal... There's quite a few rags down now soaking up the oil!

I think my rags are going to go through three phases of life - "clean", good for polishing up stuff, wiping hands on, jobs that aren't too oily; "dirty", for mucky jobs like cleaning grease out of bearings so I can see the circlips etc; and "oily rags" for soaking up spills etc. After that they'll only be good to burn I think. Probably quite good for lighting BBQ's so long as we don't try to cook until they're completely gone!

I ran out of time at that point as we wanted to go up to town to arrange our holiday - 2 weeks on Canada's east coast - Halifax & St Johns. Lovely. Added bonus - 2 days in Montreal on the way back. I know nothing about Montreal, didn't they have a winter olympics there a few years back? so that'll be interesting. Justin ended up quite randomly in Halifax and St Johns on a sailing trip with a friend last summer and he thinks I'll like it out there, so I'm really looking forward to this holiday. I've wanted to go to Canada since I was a kid, not really sure why but I've always had a soft spot for the country.

Anyway, that's about it for this entry, sorry it's been so long but I have a hectic life! Catch you all anon