Drew's 850 L Restoration

[Good Times]

Nice and shiny! Careful...it can become an obsession. You're catching "the sickness."

[Higgibaby]

Nice work!!

[mikerophone]

Wow. Yes nice work indeed! I have the exact same bike and will be swapping the motor and harness into my 81 850G, and vice versa, then doing a mild cleanup on the frame, wheels and forks, guess I'd better do the carbs and engine while I'm at it.

Care to share the details on your polishing techniques?

[Chromedome]

another Wow, when you started I thought you were mistakenly doing "The makeover begins!" on the wrong bike, LoL.
............(Polishing techniques ....... Yes Please)

[jsandidge]

Thanks for the kind words guys. I'm really happy how that 1st fork leg came out. Honestly, it was a ton of work. I originally started with 220 wet/dry sandpaper (what I had on hand), before I told myself that it was taking too long. So, I went to a 100 grit dry paper which worked much more quickly to remove the fine pitting. This still took a couple hours or more. From there, I went through the stages (all wet) from 220-400-600-800-1000-2000. Probably could have skipped a couple of the steps, but they each only took about 20 minutes or so. After that, I used a sisal wheel on my bench grinder with a red tripoli bar. Lastly was a cloth wheel on the bench grinder using a white rouge bar. I started the initial sanding on the 2nd fork last Sunday. I'll finish it Friday since I have the day off.

[jsandidge]

Can you guess which one I've been working on?



Stripped the whole wheel, polished the spokes and rim, masked it off with high temp tape, then powdercoat. Still have to put the final polish on the shiny parts. No, that's not an oops at the bottom, it's a reflection!

[Good Times]

Looks great JS!

[jsandidge]

More progress! Powdercoated the rotors and calipers. Got the front end assembled, finally. Also have the motor all sealed up to scrub down for paint. I'll post some before and after pics of the motor. It looks awful now.

[ShadowFocus603]

Looks great. I will be doing this on 750L #1 in the near future and will be mimicking you quite a bit with the polishing and powder coating.

[jsandidge]

Finally got the engine on a stand today to start the cleanup. There must have been 1/4" of crud in the starter cavity!





These are before pictures. I'll be scrubbing with Simple Green tomorrow. All I've done so far is scrape and vacuum that starter cavity.

[mikerophone]

Awesome - you gave me a great idea on how to cover the intake and exhaust ports... I have a cnc router at work so I am going to trace the carb boots an exhaust clamps and cut them out of PVC or acrylic, complete with holes and all.

[jsandidge]

Awesome - you gave me a great idea on how to cover the intake and exhaust ports... I have a cnc router at work so I am going to trace the carb boots an exhaust clamps and cut them out of PVC or acrylic, complete with holes and all.

I have a laser cutter at work, so I cut them from acrylic. Had to double up the material. You can see in my pic that one of them cracked before I doubled them up. Underneath them is some rubber mat that is adhesive backed. Cut that on the laser too. The 2 center exhaust ports have the rubber being held in with the stock exhaust collars, since they are obviously stiffer than acrylic. The other 2 don't come off of the exhaust, or I would have used them too.

[mikerophone]

That's awesome - I have a laser cutter at work too! Cuts up to 1" thick acrylic (but not polycarbonate) although I have a lot more scrap PVC/Sintra on hand to use.The rubber mat is a good idea as well, I was just going to use some cut up inner tubes but the mat may work better I just think it will smell and smoke like crazy when cutting.

[jsandidge]

Engine paint

Today was motor painting day! Very pleased with the VHT paint. Covers are still masked off, I'll start polishing them next weekend.

[mikerophone]

Looks great - is that the VHT SP-127? Did you prime it too? Funny cause I'm blasting mine today and with any luck will paint tonight or tomorrow night.

I picked up the SP-127 and the VHT engine enamel primer from Autozone today. I don't have an oven that will fit my engine and it says it needs to bake at 200° F although it says the heat from the engine will also curious so I need to get the engine there shortly after I paint it.

Forgot to reply to this thread but I also ended up cutting my in and ex ports with the CNC at work out of PVC. So far they are working great, thanks for the idea!