Riding KLR and R11S, Fixing SV!

April 26th in New England, and three of my four road-legal motorcycles are on the road! The KLR and R11S even have their current inspection stickers. The VFR is still mothballed; that'll come out this week. The SV is down for a whole mess of maintenance: started with a carburettor root and rebuild (we found a jet kit in there! who knew!), moved to "fix the leaky fork" -- I swear that fork wasn't leaking when I parked it for the carb work. She just got all +OMG ATTENTION HERE FIX THIS TOO.+ So, fork rebuild will involve installation of new springs and cartridge emulators while we're in there replacing seals and fork oil. And when I say "we" I mean my dear friend Will, who has a garage, and all kinds of know-how and a ton and a half of tools and lots of experience rebuilding carburettors and forks. Also a garage where he doesn't mind that bike being parked for a couple of weeks. Next on the list for the SV is a new exhaust system; I didn't go out looking for one, but since a growly aftermarket exhaust pretty much fell into my lap, well, yeah I'm going to install it. This will involve a torch for the rusty header bolts. Fun! The KZ is > < this close to being so very ready for the road; what with all the Boston Marathon mess last week I didn't get into Lowell to work on her; that'll have to happen Monday night or so. Right on the brink of having all her paperwork and all her mechanicals totally straightened out and ready to move on to her next owner, and be loved and ridden!

Happily Wrenching

Five. Five motorcycles. Turns out, five motorcycles is too many motorcycles for someone with a day job, and a solidly middle-class income. So I'm selling two of them -- the two I ride the least: the '91 VFR and the '81 KZ550. The VFR needs its carbs balanced, pretty sure; and that's not a job I want to tackle, so I'll be selling that as-is. The KZ, on the other hand, needs (well, needed) a lot of simple maintenance done, so I trailered it to my new shop space (OMG I LOVE HAVING SHOP SPACE) and have been working on it there for the past couple of weeks. I did some simple stuff first: new air filter, check sparkplugs, new rubber tank bumper, strip handlebars and put new, better bars on (only had to drill one hole!), new grips. Then, run seafoamed gas through it to get whatever muck has accumulated in the carbs to dissolve out. Then, take the front end apart and bring the forks to my friend Will's house for a rebuild -- he's got things like dental picks, snap-ring pliers, and punches, that the shop doesn't have and ... well, honestly, that I didn't know we'd need 'til we got in there. So we took the forks apart, cleaned everything out, replaced the seals, and put them back together. Good news: they're not leaky anymore! And with the new more-cafe-less-elkhorn bars, it looks like such a great retro (but not godawful 80s) bike. Next steps: a good (kinda illegal since it's not registered) scoot to work out all the crud, an oil change, some bar risers, figure out a better place for those turn signals, and figure out why the turn signals are not blinking. :-/

Renewing My Blogging!

Well, why not. Since this is a "mostly motorcycles" blog, I'll just say: it's January, most of my driveway has 2" of ice caked on it, the KLR is out but the other four are mothballed for the winter. Tonight: icemelt on the driveway in anticipation of this weekend's predicted warmer-than-normal (January Thaw is, apparently, a Thing) temps here in New England, so I can free that bike and go for my first ride of 2013. With pictures. Wish I had remembered this blog this past September when my phone wouldn't connect to FB. California! Rental R12RT! California! Maybe I'll just post some of those pics here, later, since it's winter...