I'm planning on calling the dealer in Salinas on Monday and telling them to expect me on Saturday, February 3. If all goes well and they don't charge too much for freight/assembly, I'll be riding out of there. Peter has a good point, however, that I should do a little research on breaking in the engine -- I know that during the break-in period, the bike shouldn't go above a certain RPM, but if there's a speed limitation or something too, then I shouldn't ride it home from Salinas. Nothing like going 35mph for 70 miles. :( So, that'll be this week's homework assignment. If it turns out that I shouldn't ride it, I'll expect to pay out the nose for shipping the bike to my apartment. Feh.
pixie power posse party
Ann and Kim came over to Peter's house today, to play with our bikes. Kim
didn't end up riding because she wasn't feeling very well, but she was her
usual wonderful self and came over anyway to hang out and talk shop. :)
Ann brought her gas tank over, which had just been boiled out to remove
rust. The plan was to go to Road Rider and get some Kream for her tank (to be honest, I'm not
sure what Kream really is/does. I'm assuming some sort of sealant. Ann?),
and then spend the afternoon Kreaming her tank and starting to take apart
the front end of the Nighthawk.
Well, like all best laid plans, it didn't exactly work out that way, but I don't think anyone's complaining. After lunch, we went to Road Rider (and brought Peter and his roommate Sam with us) as planned, but we ended up spending quite a lot of time there. Ann did get her Kream, and tried on some pants; Kim tried on (and bought!) a newest-model bright blue Joe Rocket Ballistic jacket (the blue is really neat and is much cooler than the black in that picture). Ann and I both have last year's ballistic model; this year's is roughly the same, but has a nice neck liner, and the armor is held in by zippered pouches (as opposed to our velcro ones). There are also some minor style differences. I'll have to get a picture of Kim with her new jacket; it looks really nice. :) I also scored pretty well at Road Rider: I got a pair of FirstGear Flightline pants! They're leather, and comfortable (though it feels weird to wear pants that *fit*, instead of my three-sizes-too-big baggy jeans), and aren't too tall! I was totally amazed. They just fit perfectly. They have this weird looking pouch that zips onto the hip, which I'll probably take off most of the time, but other than that, they look really nice. And everyone assured me that it won't look lame to be wearing leather pants with a textile jacket. ;)
the nighthawk.
So, once we got back to Peter's from Road Rider, I decided it was time to
start working on the Nighthawk. Last night, Kim and I had gone to Home Depot
(huzzah!) and bought 4 cinderblocks, a 1 1/2" thick slab of styrofoam,
and some of that non-stick meshy rubber stuff that you lay down underneath
carpeting on wood floors. So this afternoon, I piled one of the cinderblocks
on top of another one, cut a piece of styrofoam to fit on top of it, duct
taped the styrofoam to the cinderblock (interesting tidbit: duct tape doesn't
stick to cinderblocks very well), and laid the carpet stuff on top of it.
This was to be our motorcycle stand. Now the tricky part: getting the bike
on top of it. First we took some strong rope and looped it underneath the
engine and over a beam in the garage (picture). After a few minutes, though, Peter
realized that he had some actual tie-down straps hiding somewhere, and he
ran off to get them. They were about an inch wide and supposedly could
hold around 500 pounds of tension. They weren't long enough strips, though,
so we attached two straps together, tossed one end over the beam, and ran
the other underneath the engine (picture). Around this time, our friend Gulfie came over, and being
the good little survivalist he is, he actually had a whole bunch of even
stronger tie-downs in his car. So he brought them in and we started going
through those (picture).
His straps hold something like 3000 pounds of tension, and were longer, so
we started out just using one of his straps, again tossing it over the beam
and running it under the engine block. When we started hoisting the bike
up, though, we quickly realized that because we were only using one strap,
only one side of the bike was being raised up! So we lowered the bike again,
took down the strap, attached a second one, tossed it back over the beam and
under the engine block. Now we had a crank on both sides of the bike, so
each side could be raised simultaneously. :) Peter raised the bike up enough
so that we could slide the cinderblock/styrofoam stand underneath the engine
block, and then he let the bike down just enough so that it was resting on
the block but was still putting tension on the straps. This worked out really
well, because the back wheel was on the ground, the centerstand was (I think)
on the ground, but the front wheel was raised up about a foot off the ground.
So we finally got the bike ready to work on, hurray (picture)!
So now for the fun part: the actual mechanical stuff! :) I'm not going to go into step by step detail, well, mainly because it's 1:20am and I'm really tired. I'll probably do a detailed account of the whole process once it's done, but until then, you'll just have to deal with vague "and then I removed XYZ" dialogue. My bad.
Last night while watching the Simpsons, I'd gone through my Clymer's manual and jotted down a list of what I'd need to do in order to get at the steering head bearings, and which page number of the Clymer's those procedures were listed on. This, by the way, is saving a whole lot of time. So once I was ready to start working, I set up my kickass toolkit from Peter's dad, the Clymer's, and my laundry list of stuff to remove. Peter set up a couple of shop lights (thanks, Kim, for loaning that one to us!), and we were ready to go.
The very first thing to come off was the front wheel. This was pretty easy; the Clymer's was actually relatively competant about explaining it. I removed the speedometer cable, took off the front brake caliper assembly, unscrewed the axle bolt on the one side and the axle holder bolts on the other, removed the holder, pushed out the axle, and plop! No more front wheel (picture). The only tricky thing about the wheel removal was getting the axle nut off, since it certainly hadn't been touched in 15 years. We ended up drowning it in WD-40 and then sliding a long piece of pipe over the ratchet and using the pipe as an extender to the ratchet. It gave us the right amount of leverage, and the wrench eventually turned the nut. I learned that WD-40 quickly becomes your best friend ever when you're trying to loosen nuts and bolts that haven't been so much as glanced at in over 10 years. Just an aside.
After the wheel, the Clymer's told me to take off the handlebars. First off came the right hand mirror, which was a breeze. Then the master cylinder and brake lever were removed, leaving the ignition switchbox and the throttle grip. I unscrewed the two halves (top and bottom) to the switchbox, and soon learned that there's a wire connecting the two, and that it also houses the throttle cable. I was absolutely amazed at how thin and flimsy-looking the throttle cable is -- it's practically the diameter of a thick paperclip. At any rate, Clymer's seemed to think that we could somehow magically disconnect the throttle cable from the switchbox, and this became a fun exercise for Peter and I. He'd grab the cable with needlenose pliers and try to get enough slack to get the little knob at the end through the hole (it was just like the clutch cable), and after a few minutes and a minor injury on his part, it became clear that this was never, in fact, going to happen. So I moved on to removing the headlight. This is sort of misleading; there's the actual light bulb, which I did remove, and then there's the concave housing that the bulb sits in. This housing was left, and I learned something really interesting (which, heh, is also the reason that Clymer's told me to remove the bulb): all of the electrical wiring in the front end of the bike passes through the headlight housing. Luckily, the throttle cable is also fed through there, and we were able to pull enough through to get enough slack at the handlebars to just slide off the entire grip, throttle cable, switchbox, and all.
So that's where we ended for the day today: no wheel, no headlight, and a totally bare right handlebar (picture -- I'm holding the switchbox and throttle grip in one hand, and the other arm is resting on the bare handlebar. Here's a closeup.).
Whew. This is fun. :) Hopefully I'll work on it some more tomorrow, and can report back with some more fascinating details. ;)