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    Project "Stupidity"

    Hey, all....good to be back on this forum. Not much activity since I sold my little GS550T project to my kid a few years back; so little, in fact, that I had to re-register. (d'oh!)
    I've been a busy rascal since then, buying a CB550 Four and VF750F Interceptor as projects (yet unfinished!), and I really needed a GS1000 like a hole in the head, but as you'll see, I am easily tempted. I see myself as sort of the Sarah McLachlan of Motorcycles (you've seen the commercials of her holding these poor, one-eyed kittens asking "Please, won't you help? These animals need you". I guess I feel that way about the bikes.LOL!

    Anyway, on with the show........


    Beginnings…….August, 2010 © 2010

    Egads!…..What have I done!!?

    Only broken most of my own rules, is all.
    Of all the advice I could (and do) give most potential bike buyers, everything I tell them to watch out for, I saw, deciphered, processed, and ignored.
    It didn’t start out this way, you understand. (It never does) My friend and fellow “bike mental patient” Kenny had called me, and said a friend of his had a GS1000 give-away. He’d asked Kenny if he wanted it. For free. Kenny said no; he doesn’t do Jap bikes. (He’s a Brit bike nut) but he had a friend (me) who he was sure would be interested…which is like asking Dean Martin if he’d be interested, possibly, in a dry martini…
    Ummm…..yeah. OK. Twist my arm.
    So, I asked the crucials of Kenny….like;
    (a) Does it have a title? (yes)
    (b) Have you seen it? (yes again), and
    (c) So, what’s wrong with it? (no carbs, no seat, no tank)
    This much I can deal with.
    So far, so good. I’m interested.
    Kenny tells me he can be available along with his trailer some time the following week. Again; so far so good.
    Monday comes. I call Kenny. Now things are beginning to drift left of center….
    Kenny tells me that now….ummm…the guy wants $100.00 OBO. Hmmmm. I’m a bit peeved now…it was free a couple days ago! What’s changed besides human nature? (read; greed). It does have a title, right? Yes, there’s a title; so I tell him what the hell; I’ll go 50 bucks, and wait to hear back, not expecting much, if anything. In this game, you have to play with table stakes only. I had the 100 bucks, I just wasn’t about to give it all away. Kenny calls right back-He’ll take the 50, says Kenny, and so I set up a time to get it. Oh, and by the way; Kenny says, I won’t be around tonight, but you CAN use my trailer. No charge.
    Well, if the School of Hard Knocks has taught me one lesson, it’s “He Who Hesitates Is Lost.” So I call the guy direct, arrange to meet him that very same day after work, Kenny or no Kenny, make hasty arrangements with my son to pick him up at his house for added muscle, “just in case”, and off we go.
    It’s not too far…maybe a twenty-thirty minute drive…but I’m not prepared for what we encounter.
    Jiminy Jumping Jehosephat in a blue suede suit!…this thing is a rolling effing junkyard! Fast Freddie Sanford himself would run, not walk, away from this one! Not only are the tank, carbs and seat missing, but the side covers are gone as well. The tires are rotten. The plugs are laying atop the engine, plug holes gaping wide open like starving children’s mouths, with pine needles, spider webs, and other organic unidentifiables strewn all over the top of the motor….mostly clustered around the open plug holes. The gaping maws of the intake manifolds lie open and vulnerable. “It turns over”, he says (and proudly, at that!), and invites me to pop it into gear and push the bike. Only one problem with this theory…..I can’t move the friggin’ gear shift lever, up OR down!
    The little hairs on the back of my neck are standing up on end now. Big time. I ignore them and shove the shifter hard with my hand; eventually finding first gear, somehow. I grab the bars and shove, and the owner pushes on the rear of the bike, but on the loose gravel drive, we only succeed in leaving a six-foot skid line in the dirt.
    He goes to great lengths to explain how he pulled the plugs only last fall (???) and had squirted oil down the cylinders, and “forgot” to put the plugs back in….I’m not buying it.
    “Danger, Will Robinson! Warning! Warning!” The voice of Robot from Lost in Space shrieks urgently inside my brain. And in reply, Dr. Smith retorts; “Silence, you bumbling bucket of bolts!”….as if listening to Dr. Smith ever came to any good….
    It takes even longer to re-find neutral. Houston, we have a problem…with the shifter. Possible bad shifter forks, shift drum? This thing is a Roach Coach! Walk away, not today, walk away, the voices seem to say…..
    Still, I persist. He shows me the title. He tells me his sad tale of woe about buying it off eBay for three hundred smackers and getting “ripped off”. So, spread the cheer around, eh, pal? Share and share alike?
    The bull**** is getting really deep now; as if I’m too stupid to figure out I’m buying what he didn’t already part out? No tank, no carbs, no body panels…….?
    I hear a pleasant, monotone female voice droning in the background, sort of echo-ey and distant, as if I’m watching a sci-fi flick……”Three minutes to self destruct…” I continue to listen to the guy lay it on thick. He proudly shows us his entire collection of lawn tractors, motorcycles, and other assorted junk, each complete with it’s own biography as to where he got it, how it broke, ad nauseum. I’m realizing right here and now, that this wretched hulk will cost far more to restore it than it will ever fetch on the market; especially today’s depressed bike market. “Two minutes to self destruct…” I should be running for cover, preparing for the blast. Donning the proverbial Lead Suit. The fifty dollar bill is still folded neatly in my wallet…nobody in their right mind would fault me from walking away from this train wreck now….”One minute to self destruct….59…..58….57…”
    Go. Go NOW.
    “RUN FORREST, RUN!”
    Now. Now is the time when the hero (or heroine) makes the mad scramble for the ABORT button and punches it just seconds before the whole damn thing goes up in a mushroom cloud. The Klaxon horns are blaring and the voice drones on….”6…5 seconds…4…3…”
    I reach for my wallet….”Good-bye.” says Little Miss Cheerful, in that pleasant, monotone voice, the Klaxons screeching in the background as my common sense is vaporized in a blinding flash of crackling nuclear energy and searing white heat that makes Nagasaki look like a Black Cat firecracker…….

    And so, like sheep being led to slaughter, I rolled it into the hardshell trailer and eased the front wheel up into the chock.. I had my son compress the forks as I looped the “S”-hooks of the ratchet straps around the bars and pulled them snug, then secured the rear of the bike as well. He was eyeing me suspiciously, as if I’d suddenly developed a third eye right smack in the middle of my forehead. Grown sons expect their parents to be all-wise, all- knowing. To set Good Examples and not do Stupid Things. I’m sure at that particular moment he was wondering if I’d gone completely off my rocker.
    On the ride home, he voiced his suspicions as much. Maybe it was the after effects of the blast, or perhaps the radiation from the fallout, but a vision was beginning to assemble itself in my mind's eye; that of a lean-and-mean stripped down café racer; the sort I’d lusted after but never had the courage to build. I confess; I simply can’t bear to cut up a good restorable classic bike. The urge to restore back to original is overpowering; almost sacred. This pile of bones? Meh…. No regrets. I saddled my ’85 Nighthawk S with the moniker “Lazarus”, because like the Biblical character, he was dead and entombed. Written off as dead. And I brought him back to life. Well, if Lazarus was dead, this thing could be compared to a corpse being exhumed….after five or more years of pushing up daisies!
    I dropped my son off at his house, assuring him that the ol’ man was more than capable of off-loading this pile of scrap metal by himself. I’d only brought him along in the first place, ‘cuz, well….you never know what you’ll find. Better over-gunned than underpowered, I always say. I drove it home, rolled it off the trailer and out in front of the garage, left it sitting there all by it’s Lonesome. I had to drop Kenny’s trailer off at his house before dark and got right to it, pulling back in the drive just before sunset. After shifting things (and motorcycles) around a bit, I cleared off the Handy Lift and rolled the patient up onto the operating table and raised it up to about chest-level to view the carnage. And then the hard truth really hit me. This thing looked like the friggin’ Wreck of the Hesperus! “EGADS!” I thought….WHAT HAVE I DONE…..?
    Steady, lads…came a voice from within. I know what I’m doin’….this is what I DO. I looked about me and saw not only my three ”riders”; my personal bikes, but also the other two “project bikes” in various stages of completion, not to mention the tarp-covered car behind me up on jack stands sans motor and suspension….and wondered if I’d finally gone off the Deep End. I couldn’t resist getting off a smart-assed crack at myself; “So how’s that workin’ out for ya?” True to form, I ignored the wise-ass within, and picking up my camera, snapped a few “before” shots, then traded in the camera for a wrench….and dug in.




    #2
    you have the right tools...the handy lift anyways.
    is that a mid 60's aka 65/66/67 impala i see in the bottom picture?

    Comment


      #3
      Good Luck, it does not look that bad.

      I have a very similar bike. So if you need to look at any thing to see how/where it goes swing on by, you know the address.

      Keep us posted!

      Scott..

      Comment


        #4
        Looks pretty darned good for $50.
        Sell one or two parts, the rest is free.
        Too bad the PO left the engine open twenty years ago.

        If you get that far, I have carbs and a gas tank for you.
        http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5...tatesMap-1.jpg

        Life is too short to ride an L.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by blowerbike View Post
          you have the right tools...the handy lift anyways.
          is that a mid 60's aka 65/66/67 impala i see in the bottom picture?
          No.....'72 Duster 340. But that's another forum, another thread...

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by zaipai View Post
            I have a very similar bike. So if you need to look at any thing to see how/where it goes swing on by, you know the address.

            Keep us posted!

            Scott..
            I do, that!

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by tkent02 View Post
              Looks pretty darned good for $50.
              Sell one or two parts, the rest is free.
              Too bad the PO left the engine open twenty years ago.

              If you get that far, I have carbs and a gas tank for you.
              We need to talk.....
              Which carbs? Round-slides or CV's? Tell me about the tank, as well.....

              Comment


                #8
                PM coming...
                http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5...tatesMap-1.jpg

                Life is too short to ride an L.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Looks like you have a nice front fender and rear blinkers. Good luck.


                  cg
                  sigpic
                  83 GS1100g
                  2006 Triumph Sprint ST 1050

                  Ohhhh!........Torque sweet Temptress.........always whispering.... a murmuring Siren

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Oh yeah?

                    You think that's bad? Take a look at what I bought for my first bike. Got it for $40. The damn thing is missing everything and was literally a POS! Sold it a month later. I still can't believe someone wanted to buy it! Good luck with yours. Keep us posted.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Originally posted by Charlie G View Post
                      Looks like you have a nice front fender and rear blinkers. Good luck.


                      cg
                      Front fender has a two-inch crack forward of the doubler......

                      Comment


                        #12
                        The Frame Game

                        The Frame Game © 2010

                        The last time I had the dubious honor of observing a gorilla eating a banana (at a county zoo), it took all of about, oh…say, 10 seconds for the perp in question to peel back the skin and squirt the good stuff into his mouth, tossing the peel aside with all the casual deftness of a S.W.A.T. team member chucking aside an empty magazine. I would certainly hope I showed more passion and attentiveness to my GS as I stripped it down, and truth be told, it took a little longer that than the aforementioned 10 seconds…but not a whole lot more. I mean, it’s not like I claim to be the Dalai Lama of Motorcycles, or anything, but once you’ve stripped a bike down to it’s Whitey-Tightey Fruit-Of-The-Looms, it’s pretty much the (yawn) same old thing. And so it was.
                        The first banana to go was the 800-pound exhaust (OK; I exaggerate…..it might weigh a mere 400 pounds). Not wanting to snap off any of the eight bolts fastening the flanges to the head, I thoroughly soaked them with Kroil and dragged out the heat gun….and fired away until the bolts were smoking merrily. I cracked them loose and let the Kroil do it’s job, which worked quite well on all involved with the exception of the one (there’s always one!) that decided to snap off just to spite me. Which, in the end, worked out, as it just cemented the idea that had already wormed it’s way into my brain….that the head needed to come off; and I’d deal with the rogue stud later. Holding the exhaust was reminiscent of a mastodon’s tusks, for some reason…maybe the size, the shape…..or perhaps the weight of the offending item triggered this mental picture…either way, I put the exhaust on the top of the “This Sh!t Needs To Go Away” pile. Once the exhaust was out of the way, I was able to sneak my scissors jack with a sawed-off two-by-four under the oil pan and wobble the ass-end of the bike up enough to extend the center stand., in what would amount to a farewell tour for this particular piece of equipment, as stripped-down café racers have little need for a butt-ugly five-pound center stand, especially when I’m constantly tripping over my Lockhart-Phillips swingarm stand on a daily basis. As for the future owner…hey; that’s his problem. Once the rear wheel was hoisted up off the Handy Lift, it was a matter of about two, maybe three minutes before the rear wheel lay propped up against the aforementioned swingarm stand with the swingarm following suit shortly thereafter.
                        Getting the rear sprocket cover off proved to be a bit more of a challenge than I anticipated; the screws all broke loose with my impact driver fairly easily, but once free, the cover refused to slide free. This mystery stumped me for a few minutes, until I realized that corrosion on the shifter shaft was the culprit. Once I worked the damn thing off there, painstakingly rocking it to and fro, I solved another mystery; the whole hard-shifting issue. Corrosion had built up on the outside diameter of the shaft and the inside diameter of the cover to the point where, well, it wouldn’t shift, as so deftly described in Part One of this tome. Once the cover was free and I’d burnished the shaft with some crocus cloth; Lo and behold, it shifted free and easy like nobody’s business! Feeling rather smug and pleased with myself, I carried on.
                        As for bodywork, well there wasn’t much to begin with, as evidenced in the pictures. It would take longer to write about removing the rear fenders, signals, battery box and electrical panel than it actually took to remove them. The biggest hurdle I had to leap was pulling the motor….which took all of maybe ten minutes, with the help of my son, who stopped by to lend a hand. Frankly, it took longer to shift bikes around for access to the dolly I would end up placing the motor on, and giving us room to roll it, than it took to pull the motor. Next thing you know, I’m left with two Big Pieces; a bare frame, and a funny-looking Unicycle. The Unicycle itself took no more than a few minutes to disassemble, leaving me with one large box of parts labeled “This Sh!t Needs To Go Away” and two smaller boxes of parts labeled “Clean and re-use/re-engineer.” Imagine that; the Stuff Dreams are Made Of, confined to two small-ish boxes. Quite frankly, this is part of the Fatal Attraction of wrenching on bikes; unlike cars, which require a Rather Large Area to spread your mayhem over, a large-ish bike like a GS1000 requires only a couple square feet to scatter parts all about. What does this all mean? I don’t know. All I know is I have a small pile of parts and a tube frame sitting on my lift waiting for the next stages of this restoration to begin….I’ve played The Frame Game and won, apparently.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Its like driving down Route 12 and seeing a cop with a customer... You have to look... Thats what this thread is doing to me. I await the next chapter...
                          Curt
                          sigpic'85 GS1150 1428 14-1 200+hp Hang On

                          Comment


                            #14
                            We interrupt this program.....

                            .....not with an important message from Our Sponsor, but rather, with a halt in progress due to the fact that I'm coming down off a nasty bout with the flu that pretty much laid me out over the weekend.
                            Feelin' better today, though.....

                            That said and done, aside from an opportunity to catch up on some much-needed sleep, and giving my lawn mower a break, it also gave me time to cogitate on the next step... which would consist of:
                            1) "chopping" unneeded weight from the frame
                            2) media-blasting
                            3) priming and painting aforementioned tubular obstrufication
                            Not wanting to infringe on anyone's copyrights or patents, I will simply post a url to the website showing what I consider the "poster child" of GS1000 cafe racers to emulate:
                            Oops, looks like the page is lost. Start your website on the cheap.


                            Love the color....love the bare-bones, stripped down look. Kudos to Ben Starks on a killer cafe.

                            I love the fact that he built the seat and cowl himself. I also admire the difference in color between the swingarm and frame; it highlights the Vee-shape of the frame in a most positive attitude. I will probably follow suit.
                            The carbs......uhhh, not so keen on the copper hue. (What was he thinking?!)

                            Sawing off the pax footpeg loops.....yeah; I'm up with that.
                            Now, for the kicker.......What color, the frame?
                            I have several ideas floating about the old cerebellum....all not involving black......and this probably means leaving metallic lime green out; not because I don't love it (I do!) but moreso, because it's been done. And, quite well, I might add!
                            I have some ideas....I've told you that much. But, I'm always soliciting ideas from other people's point of view, and so I'll do as much here.
                            Suggestions?
                            Don't be bashful......

                            Comment


                              #15
                              And One More Thing......

                              .......that I almost forgot to mention; I have little money to commence this project with (which explains the two previously-mentioned unfinished project bikes and car), so not only will this be an experiment in creativity, but a project in creativity with few financial resources. Should make for an interesting project, no?

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