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. :-/