Time for new shoes; Joey's K3 needs to pass inspection.

So Joey's CB750 K3 failed VA safety inspection for a couple things: The taillight was out, the rear brake was out of adjustment, and the front wheel bearings were bad.

I'm still waiting on the replacement front bearing but over the Thanksgiving break I fixed the other problems.

I first assumed that the taillight was just burned out since it worked before. Nope, not the case.

How this happened, I have no idea.

Nothing my trusty electrician's knife can't handle.

I yanked the wires from a busted ignition switch I had lying around
 and soldered them to Joey's.

All done minus encasing the connections in hot glue to insulate them.

Next up is the rear brake shoe replacement.

Wheel off.

Shoes removed and hub cover cleaned.

Inside of hub cleaned and and roughed.

New shoes and springs installed.

Finally, the bike needs new front wheel bearings. I have a NOS rebuild kit I never got around to using, the only problem is it's missing a bearing. So I went back to Manassas Honda and ordered the missing part.
In the meantime, I pressed out the old bearings:

To say the retainer was a bitch to remove is the understatement of the century.

After a lot of hammering, PB B'laster, chiseling, screaming, and finally Dremel-ing followed by more hammering, the soft aluminum bearing retainer came out.

It looks surprisingly intact,
especially considering the amount of effort I put into destroying it.

With the bearing retainer removed the bearings pressed out, this wheel was set aside and replaced with a spare until the new parts arrive.

That's it! You're grounded!

Still trying to sort out the GL1000's problems, I decided to take a break from the head scratching and do something productive.

The condensers are normally grounded to the battery box. This is a poor place to ground them because of their distance from the breaker points plate, especially when you consider how prone that battery area is to rusting due to gasses vented by the battery. The Ideal place to mount them would be on the points plate itself but there's no room in there so we must improvise a better solution.

So I busted out some spare 8 AWG wire, some shrink wrap, and a couple of ring terminals and got to work.

The result:

Wire attached to the condenser ground.
Notice the rust on the battery basket where it's mounted.

Wire barely peeking out from behind engine mount where it's grounded.

Altogether pretty clean install.

I figured it would still be good practice to properly ground the condensers, despite the fact that I plan on running a Dyna-S in the near future. Who knows, maybe my electronic ignition could fail and I would have to throw my spare points plate on in order to make it home. It would be a shame to burn through a set of points just for that.

Symptoms of poorly grounded condensers include:

• Exploded, prematurely worn, or damaged points
• Poor idle
• Hard starting
• High rev missfire