and now back to bikes.
Speaking of books, first of all, I'm on my second attempt to read Ted Simon's
Jupiter's Travels. I don't remember why I stopped reading
it the first time -- I think I was reading it before bed and accidentally put
the book back on the shelf and forgot to keep reading it. Incidentally,
this shouldn't be an accurate representation of how attention-keeping the
book is; I'm just absent-minded sometimes.
This afternoon, I had my orchestra concert (I play the viola for Foothill College's orchestra). I think it went pretty well; Peter said we sounded great. If any of you are classical music buffs and would like a copy of the CD we made of the concert, email me and let me know. But anyway, after the concert, I went back over to Peter's to putz around with the bike some more. Peter loitered around the garage a little -- he was still wearing his nice clothes from the concert and was on the cordless phone with his parents in Ohio, so he was mainly my tool-fetcher and oops-I-dropped-a-washer looker. It was like being a surgeon, except that instead of doing the "scalpel?" "scalpel." routine, it was like, "13mm ratchet?" "13mm ratchet."
I'd left off last night with the right side of the handlebar removed, so I picked up tonight with the left side. I took off the sideview mirror, unscrewed the bolt that holds the clutch lever in (it also keeps the clutch assembly attached to the handlebars), unscrewed the screws that hold the clutch assembly together, and pop! No more clutch assembly. This also got rid of the horn/turn signal/hi-low beam switch assembly (picture).
Now that everything was off of the handlebars, it was time to remove the actual bar itself. I have a tube handlebar, which means that it's one continuous handlebar, rather than the clipon bars on more modern sportsbikes. All I had to do to remove the handlebar was to unscrew the four hex screws that hold a piece of plastic over the handlebars right underneath the instrument panel and ignition. This was somewhat easier said than done due to the screws' extreme unwillingness to turn, but after a copious amount of WD-40 (so good), some cursing, a minor bruise to my knuckle, and a lot of pushing on the allen wrench, the screws all came out. The handlebar holder came right off, and without anything holding it down, so did the handlebar (picture) (If you look right underneath the ignition, you can see where the four hex screws go, and the handlebar normally fits right into those sideways-U looking pieces).
Next up: the instrument panel. The first thing to do was to pop off the seat, take off the right side panel, and disconnect the leads to the battery. That way, there's no way I could accidentally fry myself while mucking with the wiring to the panel. After that was taken care of, I unscrewed the main cables that led up into the back of the speedometer and tachometer (the speedo cable is connected to the wheel; to be honest, I'm not sure where the tach cable disappears to). I made a mistake and started unscrewing the screws that actually hold the speedo to the instrument panel assembly, and when I removed one of the nuts, a washer went flying somewhere. We never did find it, so I should go get a replacement, because when I put the nut back without it, the speedo wiggles a little now. Oops. So, yeah, I didn't want to take the speedo and tach off of the instrument panel -- I wanted to take the entire instrument panel off of the front of the bike. So, once I figured that out, I had Peter look into the headlight casing and disconnect all the wires that he saw that went to the instrument panel. I think there were three: the main trunk of like 5 or 6 wires, and then a group of 2 wires each that went to the speedo, and likewise for the tach. I'm still uncomfortable yanking apart wires and connectors, but Peter's really good at judging that stuff, so I had him do the wiring stuff. :) Once everything was disconnected, we found the bolts that hold the instrument panel onto the frame of the bike. A little bit of WD-40 and a lot of shoving wires around later, the bolts were removed and the instrument panel lifted right off (picture).
That's pretty much where I left off tonight. I wanted to get started on removing the horn, since that's the last extra component that needs to be removed before I take off the fender and forks and etc, but the bolt holding that baby on wasn't coming off for love or money. So I busted out the good ol' WD-40 and am going to let it soak until the next time I go over there to work.
So, here's what the bike currently looks like. No wheel, headlight, handlebars, or instrument panel (or side panel, in this picture). This is just too much fun.