Egon247

Yup. Like buying a new chain link (temporary fix btw) and then having to buy the tool to go with it

Diy manometer/carby sync tool in progress.... Went down to the garage all excited to make up the manometer and found the bike looking like it had wet itself. Seems the fuel tap has given up the ghost and needs some attention. After clearing all the clag out of it , I did wonder if it would be ok.... apparently not.

Especially so when theyre full of gunge and cack.

Went to the local Honda dealers to just have a mooch about. Nice guys in there (21st moto Swanley, Kent). Ended up buying some bits cos i'm impatient. Bought a genuine oil filter, sump washer and a couple of other odds and sods. Seems the genuine oil filter comes with the tool to remove them, which is nice. One more tool added to the collection. Been falling into the rabbit hole of chain rivet tools. Its a bloody mine field, isnt it? They range from chinesium ones at £10 all the way up to the actual DID one at about a ton!! Might just buy the sealey one at £40 and have done with it. Alongside my DIY carb balancing thing that i'm making (couldnt get the thing to start at all on wednesday, it really didnt sound happy, i think the rebuild has put the carbs all out of kilter, which is entirely understandable!!) i'll have a garage full of weird things that i'll use once in a blue moon!!! Exhaust heat shields are off and have been attacked by the wire wheel of justice, then some etch primer and some Halfords VHT grey - the exhausts are going to get the same treatment i think, theyre a bit ropey in OEM silver/rusty bits.... Found a complete brake rebuild kit for the front from wemoto at a very reasonable £80. Even the dealers suggested it as just the pistons alone from Honda came to £240!!! The calipers are currently in the airing cupboard after a few coats of "subaru" gold (think 1990's VFR). Jees...then the master cylinder gets the treatment after that. Just need a decent lottery win i think...

I've just looked and a new chain n sprocket is £100 so I'll add it to the ever increasing list!

Hmmm. That don't look right, does it?

Im pinning my hopes on the excel one in february for some bargains. Lets hope thats not the shape of things to come....

She's perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrty... Gotta love an italian. My moniker with my alfa is this: "its like marrying a supermodel, 80% of the time its amazing, 10% of the time its trying to bankrupt you and the other 10% its trying to kill you".

I'm already on my way back up the curve. Interesting avatar, JRH. I have a signed copy of the hogfather on my shelf

With the car (haven't actually used the bike yet, its still in bits!) i wait until the coolant is up to temperature before giving a boot full. Its an alfa TBI engine and parts are expensive/hard to get/hard to get AT so i treat it with kid gloves until its warmed up. Even then, i still cant use all the performance as there's usually other people in the way! Mechanical sympathy is the way forward in my head. But I'm an engineer so i kinda figure that its part of my job to mot take things up to 11 on startup. There's a thing called a bathtub curve, where the probability of failure is high to begin with, calms down to a sensible level, then as it gets older it goes back up again - hence it looks like a bathtub, i tend to look at things like that. If i push the start button and it doesn't go bang, I'm onto a winner.

Niiiiiiice.

Have you got it yet? Have you got it yet? Have you? Huh? Sorry, just excited at other people's projects... Just realised it's wednesday. Lol. That's shift work for you. Sorry.

I did try and get them to move, I just had visions of them being so far back in the calipers that I couldn't get hold of them to get them out again. There's no easy way to hold a caliper in a vice, is there? They need to make them square.

Today was "front brake foray" day. So the fronts were both seized on. Judicial use of a deadblow hammer persuaded them to let go of the disc and eventually they came off. Thankfully someone has fitted Goodrich hoses at some point so I don't need to worry about those. I tried the block of wood and airline trick but those pistons were not budging. No siree. So I gave in to inevitably and had to use a pair of mole grips and a big driver to wiggle them free. Looks like the dust seals had been put back in badly and were hanging out of the bores between the pistons. Meh, add them to the list of things to buy. All the small parts were plopped into the ultrasonic cleaner and came out quite nicely. The thing that struck me though was how small the pistons are. I mean, she's a lump and iirc about 130bhp, those pistons just look waaaay too small. I'll get some stainless ones along with the seal kits too. And a master cylinder rebuild kit.

Carbs are way out of balance too, I don't think my petrol can has been used in at least 15 years, so it could be all sorts of things Oil n filter next, that oil is 16 years old....

I think it was the stuff I put down the holes when the plugs were out and some of the stuff I'd been using to clean up with, mixed into the fuel. Wasn't an oily smell, was a bit more pungent than that. (My rd250lc used to grenade a lot, so I know what oily death smells like. )

I'd post a video but it won't let me. Just make vroom vroom cough cough noises ...

It runs.....sort of. Smoky as hell but it's alive. Better change that oil , I think. It sounds unhappy at being woken up.

Today was "let's see what the tank does with some fuel in it" day. To which the answer is decisively "nothing" I kinda figured that the fuel tap would look like the carbs, if not worse but held a straw of hope I was wrong.. Lol. So the comedy is, once you've got a litre of fuel in it and the tap doesn't work, you have to undo the tap and improvise. Got MOST of it in a container. Glad I don't smoke anymore So, fuel tap off and stripped down carefully. Everything is intact but very sticky. I think the o ring from tap to tank is utterly shot so I'll need a new one but the rest looks ok. Removed a sludge fest from the bottom of ith inlet filter things too. Pic1 is sludge from there filter fillers. Good clean and back together, just need that tank oring and I might have a shot at starting it up ..(then oil+filter change after that!)

The carbs are in. On. In? So after moaning that the airbox doesn't come out to remove the carbs, guess what I forgot to do? So technically they've been in/on twice. Rubbers needed some persuasion with the heat gun but hey, job done. Got some family stuff to sort so might be a while before the next installment...

Hopefully. I'm aiming at having it all good for my 50th at the end of April...

I have PTCD Post Traumatic Carb Disorder. That was not fun. Got it all back together, after half an hour of debating whether or not the orings in the jet kit were for the fuel feed pipes, the vent pipes and the joiners. Seems they were. Yay. Only I then realized that the choke bar needed to go in. No worries, that'll just poke, it'll just, ah. Bugger. It has a bendy bit in the middle and it needs to go on while your other 8 hands are putting the carbs back together..... Yay. It's on. Now for the choke links to hold it to the bar.......oh. two out of the four were in the wrong place. All apart again. New words were learned by next doors children..... Apart again. Taking my time. Taking care. Slowly slowly monkey win or how ever it goes. Yay. Choke works, butterflies all work together. JIS screwdriver still in the garage and not in orbit. Only a few bits left over too.... Carb tops off for a coat of VHT (right one this time!) and tomorrow I'm attempting to put them back on the engine....

Sorry for the slow updates, it's half term and the wife's a teacher, so we gotta do the family thing. Little bags of shiney things have been emptied and bits installed. Had to do a reality check on my head a couple of times as the mixture screws only go in one side but there's a hole that's not tapped on the polar opposite of the carb. Had to laugh. The rail that hold all the carbs was looking a bit grim so that got some paint, just something I had laying around, it doesn't matter as you're not gonna see it unless it's all going wrong Waiting 24h for that to go off and then the fun job of looking at the 32 photos I took to see where all the joiners and vents go. Might rig them up to a little tank to make sure it's not leaking too. I'm going to try the original rubbers, they've had some Autoglym bumper gel on them for a bit, forget who suggested that, might have been in the 600 thread. Whoever it was, thank you.

Shineeeeeeeey....

Today was a paula Abdul mode day: "Two steps forward and one step back" While I'm waiting for the carb kits to turn up, so thought I'd take off the radiator and fan to see what it looked like. Oh dear. Much crusty. Amazingly the only broken bit holds the rad guard at the bottom, so may be able to improvise and/or improve. Wire brushed the bejesus out of the crusty fluffy ally bits and gave it a light coat of vht black. Only it wasn't vht it was just ho hum vinyl black from Halfords. Oh how I laughed..... Here it is in its full on crusty mode...