The Shining

So now that the lawn is taken care of (for the time being) I can get back to the important stuff... my bike. So now that she's running I should start working on cleaning up the bike and seeing what I have to work with. I also looked around for the paperwork for the bike and came up short. I can't find the registration anywhere. I guess ICBC (the government run insurance company for British Columbia for all my out of town readers) will be making more money off me to get my registration papers replaced - the communist dogs.



Checked my license plate. As you can tell from the photo I haven't had insurance on this bike since November of 2004. Wow!! That's a long time to be sitting around doing nothing, I'm ashamed.

I'm still leaking a lot of oil every time I take the bike for a ride up and down the hill. It seems to be dripping down from my air breather. There's a tube tat runs from my clutch up to the breather. I must be getting oil overflow from there. How much oil is in this bike? How do I get it out? I drained the oil and barely any came out. I must be missing something.

So I started cleaning and removing the rust off my bike. I feel like I'm in boot camp. My major cleaning tool has been a toothbrush and sand paper. There is so much rust on all of my chrome parts I doubt I'm going to be able to get it very clean without ruining the shine. Oh well! Can't cry over spilled milk. Anyways... I think by the time I'm through with this bike I'm going to have called in a few favors with my guys over at Redi-Strip. I was looking for chroming and powder coating last night and I came across a process called 'ceramic coating' if anyone knows much about it feel free to post a comment here. From what I have seen I could literally coat my exhaust manifold, muffler and engine with it and never have to worry about cleaning again. The finish is impervious to heat and won't 'blue up' like chrome. I'm going to start looking around and seeing who can do this locally for me. Would be much easier than having to sand down all my aluminum surfaces by hand.So I've managed to clean up half my bike. It's not perfect, actually it's not even half way there, but compared to before it looks great... At this point that's what counts. Here's a picture thus far.



Now I just need to clean up the other side. Maybe later!

In the meantime I gotta get down and grab the registration and insure the bike. It's road worthy enough to get me down to the local motorcycle repair shop. I want someone to take a serious look at my carbs (as in carburetor not carbohydrates ->though I should be watching those too). Have them balanced at a shop and see if there is any internal damage that I need to worry about before I disassemble the bike. On a plus note my tires are practically brand new!