I’ve just gotten out of school for the year, so my project has officially begun! I did manage to get some work done over spring break though, so to start I’ll quickly describe what I’ve done as of now.

The biggest goal at the moment is the completion of the engine. When I bought the bike, the previous owner had already cleaned, reassembled, and painted the lower crankcase. That included the crankshaft, pistons, oil pump, and transmission. The generator and clutch assemblies were still detached.

The first thing I did was to clean and polish the aluminum covers for the right and left sides of the crankcase.

My process for polishing: Wet sand with 220 grit sand paper, followed by 400 grit, then 600 grit, then 1000 grit. I then polished them on a polishing wheel using black emery polishing compound followed by white diamond. It took me about 6 hours to do each piece, but by then end of the process they were polished to a mirror finish.

Before:
    

These aren’t the best pictures, but I didn’t think to take any pictures before I started working.

After:

After this, I mounted the clutch and generator assemblies and attached the covers to the engine. I haven’t fully attached them yet, because I plan on repainting the entire engine block and head with black grill paint, but I want to leave the covers polished aluminum. It’ll be easier to remove them to paint, rather than mask them off.

Then I started rebuilding the top half of the engine. Doing this, I ran into the issue that the PO had replaced the stock cam chain tensioner with a KA slipper tensioner.

The problem is, it was slightly bigger than the stock tensioner, and it didn’t fit into the channel on the bottom of the cylinder head. I had to have the head machined to make the channel about 1 cm wider.

After this was complete, I seated the valves in the head using a borrowed valve compressor from AutoZone.

Then the head and the cam case were attached to the engine.

Along side of this, I was able to get the front wheel rebuilt. The rear wheel and the powder coat on the front rim were done by the PO. All I had to do was have the front drum resurfaced, then paint, respoke, and balance it.

Plans for the next few weeks:

• Rebuild the cam case
• Set valve timing and check clearances
• Close up and paint the engine
• Prep the frame for reattaching the engine