New Year, New Bike: CB360 twin

Look what followed me home today.


Happy New Year!

1976 CB360

D'awww... they look so cute together.

Oh yeah, it's got a new set of Bridgestone Battlax tires on it.

21561 original miles.

PRESERVE NATURE.

And here's the rest of her.

Joey's K3 gets new front wheel bearings.

The Rear wheel bearings were replaced when we rebuilt Joey's K3 in the first place.

The front wheel bearings were also replaced, but that was on another wheel that wound up snapping a spoke. 

Rather than spend the $$ on new spokes, and the time re-lacing them; I opted to take the lazy route and replace the bearings in the original wheel from his K3. It's funny how this wheel was previously not used because I wanted to avoid doing a bearing swap in the first place.

On the upside, this tire has more tread left that the one on the other wheel.

All the parts required.

Old bearings were already pressed out.

Notice the different part numbers?
Bearing on left is a U meaning it's sealed on one side.
The one on right is a UU meaning it's completely sealed.
The stock bearings were single side sealed but having
a fully sealed one in there won't hurt anything.

Place bearing to be set.

Cover with old bearing to drive new one in evenly.

Cover with rubber maillot and smack with a BFH.

Place oil seal.

Place bearing retainer ring and use a spanner or
a screwdriver/chisel+hammer to drive it in.
I actually used a file to turn it most of the way in, then finished
driving it in with a flat-head screwdriver and maillot.

Eventually it'll look something like this.
It's easier to set the bearing retainer first then drive in the oil seal.
Or set the oil seal in the retainer then drive it in like I did.

Place the axle collar (use grease to keep it there).

Place bearing. This is the "U" (one side sealed) bearing.
Note the unsealed side is facing IN the wheel.

Place the seal o-ring over the hub.
Slide on the assembled speedo drive and slide axle through.
Sorry for lack of assembly pics here, the process was a bit too
greasy to be touching my camera in between steps.

Screw on the axle nut to the other side.

Slide on brake disc and bolts. and you're all set!

It's a pretty simple job but there's a lot of places this can go horribly bad.
Most of the bad things happen in the bearing removal process;
particularly with getting the old bearing retainer out.

Next time I do this I'll be making one of these:

Thanks Terry in Austrailia for the write-up!

More Garage Progress

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but nothing post-worthy has come about in a while.
I'm assuming no one wants to see pictures of me cleaning, scraping, and sanding a motor for the last 15 days.

To take a break from the monotony of prep-work, I reorganized part of the garage over the break. The overall status of the garage is still "messy." It will likely stay that way until I finish painting, but at least in the meantime I have some room to move about. Also, the foam floor is a definite plus for keeping my butt and bare feet off the cold concrete.

XS650 Motor Paint - Part Deux

Tommy's motor is almost done being painted. There's no new updates since the last post other than I spent 4 hours sanding the left engine side cover (alternator cover). However, I was slightly less than lazy last night and decided to take some pictures. Here you go:

The first attempt at painting this went horribly wrong.

So I stripped it all and sanded it down.

I wish I had taken some before pictures to show the
nastiness and discoloration / pitting of the metal.

After about four hours of sanding and steel wool-ing to a mirror finish,
I realized the paint would NOT stick to that surface.
So, I had to rough everything up with a wire brush.

The motor hung like this for the majority of the spraying.

At one point the motor came down to spray around these areas
where the straps and motor mounts got in the way.

There were a lot of very hard to reach areas on this motor,
making it very difficult to apply paint evenly.
It took 4 coats and a LOT of sanding to get it right.

Sanding the fins on the head and bottom case between coats was tedious. 

Spraying between these fins turned out to be harder than expected.
Most of the difficulty was due to my over-sized HVLP spraygun.
It was totally inappropriate for this level of detail and crevices. 

I even tried to sand off the tiny little bumps;  imperfections left from
the casting process. This proved to be insanely difficult
so I just left 'good enough' alone.

I'm not sure why, but the paint went on a little thick right here.
No worries though, that spot is completely hidden by the starter motor

To be frank, the top of the motor
turned out a hell of a lot better than I anticipated.

Miraculously I managed not to get any paint in any of the threaded holes
that I forgot to mask off.

This should give you an idea of how evenly the paint was applied,
even after four coats.

We're not out of the woods yet. I still need to CAREFULLY peel off the
tape from all the masked areas.

Painting the socket cap screws without taking them completely off
was hard but somehow worked.

Surprisingly this turned out to be the hardest part of the motor to paint.
It still doesn't look quite right. The metallic flake in the paint seems to
want to stick to itself and run down the side in this area.

Also, because of all the gouges and scratches that wouldn't sand out,
the paint was applied unusually thick to hide them.
It's not my best work, but it doesn't look hideous.