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On my way into work this morning, I remembered I own a sand blasting cabinet. Will try to run the cabinet without recirculating the sand. @ $12 for a 50 pound bag, way cheaper than buying chemicals or fancy strippers.
Tonight in The Shop, I’ll test the blasting cabinet before buying more media.
Back to Square 1… …if it was multi-coloured and dipped in surface rust. Not sure exactly how best to attack the round tubing frame to strip the paint, but I’m sure elbow grease is a big component.
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Today in The Shop, I was pleasantly surprised when two crucial bolts came out relatively easily. I’ve always stuggled to pull the rearswingarm bolt (even invented a puller last time I had to get one out), but this one wasn’t seized anywhere. With it, and the second pivot bolt pulled, the entire “Full Floater” rear suspension came out as an assembled unit. Three more small bolts and the tail section popped off; fender, luggage rack & taillights. 7 Male-Female connectors separated and the wiring harness came off with ease.
Safe to say I Started making progress in frame painting. The bike will get repainted. Dark Blue for the frame. Semi-gloss black for the motor, pegs and kicker. Grey or perhaps just clear coat on the swingarm. Lots of paint stripping ahead of me still.
Wow you jumped in with both feet, looks real clean under there. Way more fasteners than I thought there’d be.
Hope you’re able to get your paint without much delay.Yea my buddy James was looking exclusively for Manual trans Toyotas, roughly 2000 and newer. Gonna be fun this fall/winter with an FJ and 4th gen to go touring with when the weather turns. James already putting pencil to paper for storage and bumper ideas.
My buddy James just left a deposit on a 2008 FJ with a 6-spd, hopefully he’ll be one of our newest members once he takes delivery.
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I guess the glass half-full means your new rims will fit just fine. Excited to see the new setup.
What tires are you running on the trailer?
I’ve only got a small shopping cart on fortnine. Brake pads, chain, tires (but not set on what I want) oil filters, air filter and a battery. They don’t list my bike exactly, but have listing for an ‘85 SP600, nearly identical except for the carb. Unfortunately no listing for fork seals. They have listing for DR350 and DR650, but I haven’t been able to confirm the cross reference between them.
I have OEM part numbers, and they only cross reference 1985-1989 DR500/600. Hopefully the dealership can still find stock on these.
I’m having fun building this bike knowing I don’t HAVE TO turn a profit on it. No money spent yet, but there’s $700 of OEM parts in a shopping cart on bikebandit. Expecting to pay shipping, tax, duty on that crap if my local dealership can’t figure out how to order (then call me for pickup) about 50 small items.
Decided to keep pulling the bike apart to hit the frame with a fresh coat of paint. Currently it’s two-tone blue from a bad colour matching rattle can job, and rust at contact surfaces. Figure a couple days of effort in stripping and painting could bring me $500-1000 extra should I sell next year.
Yesterday I sorted out the rear brake lever. At my kijiji review I stepped on the pedal and it failed to return. Pretty much seized in place. Yesterday I drove it 50% out of its sleeve in the frame, and got the rust out. After resetting the tension spring and the lever back on its splines, the pedal moves good as new.
To be honest, it is something I’ve never tried. In my 10-ish years of riding, I’ve only had one set of forks which needed new seals put in. I think fear and ignorance have kept me outside of forks so far. The College of Youtube would lead me to believe that getting the forks out/back in the bike is more than half the battle, I really should attempt to replace this set of oil seals. Thanks for the pep talk Steve!
Cleaned up the carb and airbox today. Two jets were a little plugged up, but overall it was very clean inside. Nowhere near the worst carb I’ve torn into.
Had a bit of a scare when I dropped a jet in the lawn, but I found it after 5-mins of thorough (panic-driven) searching. I don’t think the fuel bowl gasket will hold, although it’s not ripped anywhere, it’s a paper gasket and not very soft anymore. Easy enough fix if it does leak. No luck finding a choke plunger yet. Sent off an email to Mikuni asking which plunger is interchangeable with mine.Also got the last two broken M6 bolts and the key-free steering lock out of the lower steering stem. Hoping I can get a keyed-alike ignition, seat lock and steering lock from Suzuki, but not feeling to confident. My local dealer feels pretty incompetent, or at least unwilling to go any extra distance. Gonna struggle to get the correct fork seals from them too I’m sure.
Today in The Shop, I payed a little more attention to the DR600S. I started the day by loosely reassembling everything I had, in order to get a good look at what else I may need to buy. Only added a couple little items to the list today: lower chain roller, rubber seat isolator & choke knob. But, I was also able to take a few items off: airbox lid, front sprocket and retainer, oil cooler frame mount. Awesome.
After the photo shoot, I started stripping the bike to power wash it. I don’t like power washing toys, too many nooks/crannies and gaskets to create trouble, but this bike was dirty from sitting, and greasy from leaking front forks.
Now that the bike is drip drying, I pulled the carb off to clean it, (tonight or tomorrow) and removed the front tire to get more access to broken bolts that have to be drilled out. Soon the forks will come out to get rebuilt, just gotta find a local shop to do that.
I’ve been debating tires off and on all day, not sure if I want to get 80/20 or 90/10 ratio for Dirt/Road. I intend to essentially only ride dirt, but don’t want to rattle my brain (or burn off all the tread) should there be a few concessions of asphalt in my tour. I like the big knobby tread pattern of 90/10, but could prolly sacrifice some knob for comfort and forgiveness haha.
Today in The Shop, a few broken drill bits while I removed broken bolts from my new 32-year old bike.
Broken bolts were removed from the exhaust header where the heat shield attaches, from the frame where the muffler attaches, and another on the frame where plastics mount. Unfortunately I only got one key with the bike and it did not open the helmet lock or steering lock mounted to the lower triple tree, so I drilled out the helmet holder itself then unbolted it. I’ll do the same for the steering lock once the forks are out of it.
Finally, I thread chased every nut on the frame that didn’t have a bolt in it, and a few nuts with “placeholder” bolts in them.I put some time into reading the service manual and the wiring diagrams. Looks like with very little modification I can replace my Instrument Cluster with one from a newer DR650S. Another option would be to swap out to a digital speedo/tach with a Trailtech Vapor or Voyager. Analog vs. Digital. I prefer the analog, seems fitting to the bike and is Almost plug-in-play, but the realtime GPS Route Tracking tracking on a Trailtech Voyager is pretty appealing.
Yesterday in The Shop, I finally took my atv out for a tour! My eldest daughter and I cruised Northbound on the local OFSC trail 2.5kms then turned around and headed back. Two hours later, we were back out and cruised almost 10km Northbound on the same trail. My girl LOVED IT!! I asked what was her favourite part, and she said “the bumps!!! And going fast!!” I guess fast must be relative to a 6 year-old, we topped out around 35 km/h in all our touring haha. Life is good!
The ATV only a tiny bit of oil weeping from the valve cover, luckily the exhaust pipe burns it off before it can pool in the chassis somewhere. I’ll look to re-torque all the bolts up there.
Also in The Shop, Matt dropped off his TRX300 with new parts to address his starting issue. I think it’s a two-fold concern, one being the starter bearing, but the second is power related. Not sure if the battery is weak causing solenoid to act up, or if the solenoid is just F’d up. I might just put the new bearing in, and suggest Matt get a new battery in the springtime. If that “little battery” is a little screwy now, it’ll be mostly screwy in March 2021.
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