Tag: motorcycle

So, the rims are back from Fireball Coatings.  They look fantastic, but I’m a bit baffled by the process.  Mark, the owner, suggested getting candy coated gold, though I’d initially said I’d just go for the plain gold.  After being convinced of the upgrade the process took longer than expected (about 20 days instead of a week) because he was out of the product needed to do it.  Communication wasn’t a strong point during this wait.

I was worried about tolerances changing on the inside of the rims, but I was assured that they  would be masked off.  The end result has a fair bit of over-spray, which isn’t easy to clean up (which I guess bodes well for the rims themselves in regular wear and tear use).  With a Dremel I’ve been able to clean up the over-spray and I’ve begun to rebuild the rims for re-installation.

The final bafflement came when Mark said that black bits dropped into the process and there are minor imperfections as a result.  They are barely visible, but his explanation was that no one does gold candy coat on rims.  This begs the question, why up-sell me on them then?  All the strangeness aside, they do look fantastic, and I’m looking forward to seeing them back on the bike again.  The final cost to coat two rims was just over $300 Canadian taxes in (or about a dollar fifty US).

I’m not sure what I’d do differently next time as I don’t have much experience with industrial coatings.  I think I’ll give Fireball another go in the future though, just not if I’m on a tight timeline.  I imagine less finicky (ie: rims without a shaft drive hub on them) parts would be less of a headache.  They had a coated motorcycle frame on the floor at the shop that looked spectacular.  Mark figures he can coat all the basic parts of a bike (frame, swing arm, exposed bits and pieces) for about $1000.

Buy ’em online and you’re looking at a lot of money for tires unseen and possible long on the rack.

The tire portion of the process was handled by Two Wheel Motorsport just north of Guelph on Highway 6.  It’s my first time doing motorcycle tires (everything previous was well rubbered when I got it and sold safetied as is).  What I’ve learned is that motorcycle tires are expensive!  And evidently wear out much sooner than car tires (odd considering how they are supporting much less weight on lower mileage).

The tires from the dealer were about forty bucks more per tire than online, but you’re buying them on the internet sight unseen, and they might be cheap because they’re stale.

I got the benefit of very experienced Concours owners in the parts department helping with tire choices rather than depending on the generic tire size finder online.  No one seems to support the OEM Dunlops that originally came with the bike twenty two years ago, so selecting ZG1000 tires is about preferences rather than manufacturer’s recommendations.

The tire pricelist from the Toronto Motorcycle Show – 2 Wheel was cheaper, and could get the weird size for my Concourse.

I was going to go with Bridgestones, but when a guy with over a million miles ridden (!) suggests the Michelins if you want good handling and amazing mileage, I didn’t ignore him. 

All was well until I got the $600 bill… for two tires!  I think my last car change was 4 Yokohamas for the Mazda2, and it cost $650 and included balancing and installation.  Like I said, bike tires are expensive!  It was $35 to install each tire – ninety nine and change for the work.  I think I got charged for tire disposal even though the rims were bare, and even though I asked for a 90° valve stem on the back I didn’t get one (though I don’t think I was charged for it).

I thought maybe buying tires at the Bike Show would save money, but the prices listed weren’t as good as the sale prices offered over the desk at Two Wheel, and they didn’t have the weird sizes I need for the Concours anyway, so that isn’t a way out.

I used to be a tire guy at Canadian Tire when I’d just gotten out of high school.  I know my way around the tools involved.  In the future I think I’m going to try and get tires and bits and pieces online and then do the install myself.  I’m going to install balancing beads on my current tires.  If they work as well as advertised, balancing (the only part that requires expensive machinery) won’t be necessary.  When I do the tires on the XS1100 I’ll do them in-house and see how it goes.

Speaking of in-house, the last frustration was removing the bearings.  I took them in to school figuring that the autoshop had a press and could take them out easily.  They sat there for a week before I finally took them home and knocked out the bearings in ten minutes.  While there for the week they managed to lose my bearing retaining clips and the front bearing spacer as well, so I’m having to spend another $20 at the dealer replacing parts they lost.  The moral of this story?  Do the work yourself.  You learn more by doing it, and you’re less likely to lose parts you need to put the thing back together again.

The missing bits and pieces should be in this week, I should have the bike back on its feet by this weekend.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks with its new kicks on.


Parts Costing

                      TIRES                            Online      Dealership   Difference
Michelin Commander II 150/80/16       $174.45        $213.79        $39.34
Michelin Commander II 130/70/18       $208.00        $244.54        $36.54
                                                                                                 ——–
                                                      money saved buying online   $75.88
                                                      + gas & time going to and from the dealer (online delivery is free)

Dealer parts total:  $458.33+$4 (shop supplies) = $462.33 (don’t see any charge for the valves)
Online order total: $442.61 (including a 90° rear valve & a front valve)

Labour Costing

Dealership installation of two tires (with new valve stems, no balancing, no disposal – though they charged me for that anyway):  $99

How to change your own tires.

Google ‘biker’ and you get a lot of pictures of old white guys. Good luck selling them bikes in 20 years.

The other day a fellow rider on twitter shared a link to this article on how the motorcycle industry is in real trouble.  Among the litany of problems was the hyper conservative nature of the industry and its habitual focus on old white guys.  The biker image is a bastion of pre-Twenty First Century prejudices; women (unless they’re pillions and dressed like dolls) and non-white riders need not apply.  Groups like Bikers for Trump continue to find a comfortable place to operate within these old-school prejudices.  I’d suggest that an industry that wants to cling to this dying sense of privilege deserves to be in big trouble.

Of a less cut and dried nature (unless you’re clinging to colonial, white guy privilege) was the piece about how young people aren’t riding motorcycles or even driving cars as much any more.  I’d argue this is a larger and more difficult problem to solve.  I struggle daily with getting young people to engage with and master real world technical problems (it’s my day job).  I wasn’t at all surprised to see this as a conclusion from the research:

“…many millennial consumers were “bubble-wrapped for safety in their youth” or raised by overprotective parents who discouraged risk-taking”

A few years ago I suggested we start a motorcycle club at our school.  Some of our students go out and get their licenses and begin to ride and others dirt bike ride, so there would be interest.  We could use the experience and expertise of our teacher-riders to help students more safely and effectively take to two wheels.  The skills learned in maintaining and repairing motorcycles in our shop would mean safer vehicles for our students to use and an increase in technical skill.  They all sounds like good ideas, right?  It was nixed immediately: a hard no.  We run rugby teams and downhill ski race teams and go camping in bear country, but riding a motorcycle?  Way too dangerous.  I suggested that was exactly why we should do it, but still a hard no.

We need to bring back the kind of inclusive advertising that worked for Honda so well over forty years ago.

There is, no doubt, a danger halo around motorcycling that is a big part of its mystique, but the operation of a motorcycle isn’t dangerous in and of itself.  Many riders like to play to this mystique, making it seem more edgy because that’s the image they want to convey, but it isn’t helping the sport.  That focus is also used to hyper masculinize the image of a motorcycle rider and plays to the conservatism that plagues the industry.  


It’s always a relief when someone subverts that tired, old stereotype…

Apart from the prejudices and mythology around motorcycling, we also have a new generation of people who aren’t taking up the sport, but then they aren’t taking up vehicle operation in general.

“For 16- through 44-year-olds, there was a continuous decrease in the percentage of
persons with a driver’s license for the years examined. For example, the
percentages for 20- to 24-year-olds in 1983, 2008, 2011, and 2014 were 91.8%,
82.0%, 79.7%, and 76.7%, respectively.”

There are a lot of social reasons for this to be happening.  More of us live in cities than ever before and driving in cities is misery.  Many jurisdictions don’t acknowledge the advantages of riding a bike in an urban environment either, making riding an even dimmer proposition than driving.  The independence afforded by vehicle operation that used to define coming of age as a teen has become increasingly expensive even as wealth has been concentrated in a smaller and smaller class of people; fewer rich get richer while more poor get poorer.  With money slipping out of the hands of a vanishing middle class, the idea of buying into the independence of operating your own vehicle becomes increasingly impossible for many youngsters, especially with systemic economic discrimination like insurance forcing them off the road.


There is a final piece to this perfect storm diminishing the motorcycle industry that I haven’t seen as much about.  Last night I watched Kingsmen: The Golden Circle, and like every other film I’ve seen in the past few years, it’s a few moments of acting tied together by ludicrous computer generated imaging.  When I was young I stumbled upon a Bruce Lee marathon late one night and got really fired up about it.  Watching Bruce do his thing was inspiring.  I’d make the argument that a generation brought up on fake, computer generated action wouldn’t feel that kind of inspiration to get out in the world and do things like do kung fu or ride a motorbike.


Marketing is happy to pick up this idea of showing you cars doing things they can’t actually do because you’re buying an idea.  How the car makes you feel is what makes it valuable, not what you can actually do with it.  Whether it’s Nissan pretending their cars are in Star Wars or Chevy pretending their cars are skateboards, the marketing and special effects departments are more than happy to sell you on an idea rather than engineering.  I won’t even get into Kia selling you on a car that will drive for you because you’d rather be daydreaming.


In this digital dream-time we’re all immersed in, you can you see why something as unforgiving and physically challenging as motorcycling might be one of the first casualties.  It’s going to be a long time if ever before we see accident avoidance on something as elemental as a motorbike.  For all those young drivers who expect their car to drive for them when they can’t be bothered to pay attention, this moves motorcycles even further away from the realm of possibility.  Coupled with the danger mythology many riders are guilty of promoting, it’s little wonder that motorcycles increasingly seem like something from another time and place.


Forgetting the old white guy thing for a minute (it’s going to go away on its own anyway), how can the industry get people back on motorcycles again?  The obvious first step is to make your advertising plausible and inclusive.  Don’t digitally animate anything.  Show riders of all types enjoying the elemental freedom of riding.  This doesn’t need to include jumping canyons or putting knees down; the joy of riding is a simple, accessible pleasure.  Show people commuting, going out on a date and otherwise living their lives.  Minimize the costuming, especially the pirate thing, emphasize how effective modern safety gear is.  Honda had this figured out decades ago and it prompted a renaissance in riding.  There is no reason why we couldn’t do it again.


Build bikes that appeal to all sorts of riders.  Smaller, easier to handle bikes for beginners that push technology to create something so efficient that it makes snooty hybrid car drivers look like diesel pigs.  A 100mpg bike is an immediate possibility.  A hybrid touring bike that gets mega mileage but can still move two up easily?  An all electric bike?    These things should be moved on aggressively. 


When coupled with a campaign to emphasize how efficient bikes can be at moving people around, especially in cities, it would play to the urbanization of our population instead of against it.  Motorized bikes are capable of moving people more effectively and efficiently than just about any other form of transportation, if we let them.  Why do you think crowded developing cities are so full of two wheelers?  Pressuring governments to recognize this and encourage two wheeling instead of vilifying it would be a great step forward.  Can you imagine how many people would flock to a motorcycle industry couched in marketing around environmentalism and the elemental thrill of riding as an escape from the digital miasma?  Escape the Matrix indeed.

Governments ignore a lot of research that clearly demonstrate how efficient motorcycling can be, especially in an urban environment.

Ontario offers thousands in incentives for people driving environmentally questionable hybrids.  What would happen if you got thousands back in incentives for buying a motorcycle that gets better mileage than a Prius?  There are a lot of them – my fourteen year old 955cc Tiger gets better mileage than the Toyota green flag waving hybrid and was way less damaging to manufacture.  Can you imagine how many more people would ride these environmentally minimalist machines in cities if they could lane split and move quickly to where they needed to be, reducing traffic and improving the flow for everyone?


Why not do one better and apply those incentives to emphasizing the power and importance of the rider?  Instead of advertising about how your car will drive for you because you’re too much of a drip to do it yourself, maybe motorcycling could emphasize the importance of the rider and include them in any upgrade.  How about training being automatically included when you buy a bike?  This would immediately result in lower accident rates and better insurance costs.  If you’re a beginner you get the training as a part of the purchase because you are immediately recognized as a vital part of the riding equation.  If you’re already experienced then an advanced riding course in the area of your choice (off-road, track, road) is included to continue your advancement in pursuit of mastery.  Motorcycle training courses blossom and grow and sales are encouraged.  How about industry and government formerly recognize the importance of the rider and collaborating to make riding the life-long learning opportunity that it should be; motorcycles become paradigms of skill, self-discovery and mastery.

Shows like Ride with Norman Reedus are gender and race inclusive and celebratory of motorcycle culture in its many forms.  We should be encouraging more shows like it.

De-snootying motorcycle culture, especially where it’s at its snootiest (North America) isn’t something to wonder about, it’s a marketing imperative.  Anyone out in the wind, even if they aren’t on a cruiser, is a part of the culture.  Scooters and three wheelers aren’t for losers, they’re a part of the sport that needs to be embraced and included.  Three wheels mean older riders and those less physically able can still enjoy being out in the wind, how is that a bad thing?  Next time someone gives you a wave from a trike, don’t be a jerk, wave back.


If the current motorcycling industry is unwilling to embrace the Twenty-First Century maybe they should be in real trouble.  There are always smaller concerns in the shadows waiting to step in and make changes where the established, conservative powers are not.  Business as usual is clearly not working.  Hopefully the industry that feeds our hobby will realize that and stop coddling Twentieth Century prejudices.  A brave new world of opportunities awaits them if they do.

LINKS

No easy ride: Motorcycle industry is in deep trouble and needs help fast, panel agrees
http://ift.tt/2j1CNNT

The Decline of the Driver’s License
Fewer people of all ages are getting them, and it’s not quite clear why.
http://ift.tt/2mcL7Lp

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I came across some motorcycle media recently that is a nice diversion if you’re suffering from PMS.

Eatsleepride.com has a series of motorcycle short documentaries that will keep you rolling on two wheels, even if it’s vicariously.

The Women’s Motorcycle Exhibit video led me to the site;  much better than the floozy on a bike photography you usually see.  There is nothing sexier than a strong, capable woman riding a bike (as opposed to a skinny model draping herself on one).

The other shorts were all new to me except for Long Live The Kings, which has since spawned The Greasy Hands Preachers.  The reviews for that film have suggested that it’s a shallow but pretty look at current motorbike customization trends.  I was hoping for something that plumbs the depths like Matt Crawford’s Shopclass As Soulcraft (a must read),  but it evidently isn’t that, though I’m still looking forward to seeing it.

I also found Brittown, a documentary about Meatball, a master mechanic and Triumph motorbike connoisseur out of California.  It’s a genuine look at a genuine fellow.  You’d be hard pressed to find any hipster bullshit in this video.

I also completed the set.  Having already seen Faster and Fastest, I was finally able to see The Doctor, The Tornado and The Kentucky Kid, the middle Motogp video in the trilogy.  It’s a close look at a single race at Leguna Seca.  The phoned in interviews are a bit low-rent, but the drama is as engaging as ever.  If you want to get into Motogp, these videos will give you the background you need to get right into next season.

In the meantime, the mighty Austin Vince put out Mini-Mondo, another motorbike short (poem!) that (hopefully) gets you out on two wheels and seeing what’s around you:

We’re buried in snow in mid-November and thoughts of riding are weeks behind me now, but at least the media I’m finding keeps the two wheel dreaming alive.

The Connie at the covered bridge in West Montrose

Finally got out for an hour today.  Only about 5°C, but sunny.  With a sweater and my swish new jacket I was comfortable behind the Concours’ fairing.  At speed on back roads you only get a bit of wind around the head.  Your hands are protected by the wing mirrors and the rest of you is behind fairing.  The Connie is comfy in the cold.

The bike feels very light once it’s in motion, very flickable.  I’m coming off a Ninja 650r, so I’m riding 350 more ccs, two more cylinders and one hundred more pounds of bike, but the Concours feels quick.  It doesn’t spring forward with a banshee’s wail in the upper rev range in the startling way that the NInja did, but it’s not nearly so peaky either.  It also has suspension more than up the task of dealing with Canadian roads.  Where the Ninja used to rattle my teeth over a pothole, the Connie manages to swallow the worst of it while still feeling very connected to the pavement.

The Concours pulls with urgency off idle, but that urgency becomes an avalanche of torque as the revs rise.  I gave it the mustard off one stop light and was shocked with how quickly 100km/h appeared.  Both bikes are quick, but I always assumed the bullet shaped, lighter, sportier Ninja would have been the quicker of the two, that stop light torque avalanche made me doubt that.  I ended up looking up the stats on both bikes.

The bikes are coming out of hibernation in Canada – like this little jewel of a Honda with not a spot of rust on it.

The Ninja 650r does a 12.06s quarter mile at 108.79mph, the Connie edges it the quarter with a 12 flat at 109mph!

While almost identical, how they do it isn’t.  The Ninja needs a lot of throttle and a glib clutch to hook it up in the top half of the rev range, and then judicious gear changes to keep you in the top four thousand RPM through many gears.  It’s a thrilling, high tension rush up through the gears.  With the Concours you drop the clutch at about four thousand RPM and the motor just picks up the bike with no wallow and storms to the redline.  A single gear change gets you up to legal limits.  Where the Ninja had that intoxicating banshee wail, the Concours has a baritone bark that becomes a godlike roll of thunder.  I used to think the Concours inline four wasn’t as happy a creature as the Ninja’s parallel twin, but after hearing the big-four warm and in voice today I’m starting to think she just sings a different tune, but it’s no less happy.

The ride was only about an hour, but I went from constantly comparing the experience to my dear, departed Ninja to wondering just what the Concours is capable of.  As a shakedown after a long winter of maintenance, it has begun the process of rebuilding my confidence in this new machine.

I’ve had a pretty diverse group of R&R  (repair & recover) motorcycles to date.  My first R&R bike was the Kawasaki Concours ZG1000 back in 2014.  Purchased for eight hundred bucks and cut out of long grass to get it out of the field it was in, the Concours got sorted over the winter and put back on the road where it took us to Indianapolis and put over twenty thousand kilometres on it before I sold it on for what I purchased it for this past summer.


The Concours became my riding bike and I sold on the Ninja.  Eventually a KLX250 off road bike came into the garage, but didn’t last long as I struggled to find ways to use it in Ontario: land of no fun.  That led to a too-quick purchase of a Yamaha XS1100 from an entirely dodgy kid that led me into the headaches of sorting ownership.

So far I’ve been able to make money on my R&R projects, Shed and Buried style, but I don’t make it easy on myself.  Both the Concours and the XS1100 were big, four carburetor bikes with spaghetti loads of vacuum tubes and complex wiring.  I’ve taken my time looking for the next project and tried to look for something simple, air cooled and single cylinder, but bikes like that don’t come up often.  As the summer fades and winter approaches, it was time to commit to a new R&R project.

This 1997 Honda CBR900RR Fireblade came up on Facebook buy and sell.  I’ve found the local nature of Facebook’s marketplace offers up interesting opportunities that you don’t find on the hardened semi-pro sellers of Kijiji and Autotrader, where you are much more likely to find shady characters who sell a lot of crap.  This twenty-two year old non-running Honda got me curious enough to contact the seller in Alliston.

It turns out the bike had gotten tangled in a divorce and was then sidelined.  It was eventually used to settle debts between the estranged couple, but now it belonged to a non-rider with no mechanical experience who just wanted it gone.  Her new partner was trying to sell it for her, but with it not running he wasn’t getting any calls.  A late nineties CBR in safetied, running condition was going for about $4000, he was asking $1200 for this one as is.


We exchanged a number of emails, both of us cautious as we’d both met idiots from online sales (it turns out the internet is actually full of idiots).  As we got to know each other I asked increasingly direct questions – was is repainted to hide crash damage? (no, the former owner didn’t like the stickered stock look)  – why is it in this state?  (where I got the bad karma backstory this bike was unfortunately wrapped up in).  The last problem to solve was how to get it here.


During our give and take the seller offered me the bike for $1200 instead of $1300, and then said he could trailer it down to my place for $100, so I got it at asking price with a $100 delivery charge.  The bike showed up and we had a good chat and ended up being given a milk crate full of pears from his parent’s farm too.  Bonus Honda pears – good deal.  This low mileage, non-runner seemed like a steal upon first look.  The paint’s a bit rough, but for a 20+ year old low mileage bike, she cleaned up a treat.


I was told the bike was a non-runner due to the carbs.  As I got into the bike mechanically I figured I’d look at the fuel system as a whole rather than only looking solely at the carb since I didn’t know how long it had been sitting.  I’m glad I did.  The fuel tank had a worrying amount of rust in it.  I talked to people on the Practical Sportsbike Magazine Facebook group (one of my go-to bike magazines and a great place to talk to DIY types) and got suggestions around various acid etching and chemical routes.


I went out to Canadian Tire aiming to get some industrial grade hydrochloric acid but found Metal Rescue Rust Remover, a water based environmentally friendly solution that neutralizes rust and prevents more from forming.  It also helps the tank retain its structural integrity whereas acid eats holes in it.  My first go at a motorcycle tank cleaning (I’ve been lucky so far and not had to deal with it) went well.  I left the chemical in the tank for about six hours before recovering it back into the bottle (it can be reused).  With the tank sorted it was time to look at the rest.

The vacuum operated fuel pump in the bottom of the tank was clogged and a mess, but it too cleaned up nicely.  With the big end of the fuel system sorted out, I turned to the carbs.


Compared to the buried in the frame carbs on the Concours and XS1100, the Honda’s are a joy to access.  Having seen the mess that was the rest of the fuel system, I figured the carbs were crammed full of guck, and they were.  The only other issues seemed to be more about mechanical cack-handedness than wear.

Once on the bench I’ve been able to isolate some obvious problems.  I found a spring laying under the carbs on the engine case.  If you’re fixing a carb it generally helps to use all the parts.  I also found that one of the choke pins were broken, so the choke was only working on three of the four carbs, and the choke cable itself wasn’t attached correctly, so the choke was only moving about 2/3rds of the distance it should.  These are all things that would prevent the bike from starting properly.


Yesterday I took the float bowls off and had a look at the bottom end of the carbs.  The ethanol in modern fuel is not a good mix with older fuel systems, like carburetors.  Not only can it eat away at the rubber and gaskets in older systems not designed for it, but it can also leave varnish, and worst of all, it’s a water absorber, so it can lead to corrosion in older, gravity fed systems.  If there was ever evidence of modern ethanol based fuels making a mess of a carburetor, it was here in this old Fireblade, where every carb bowl was worse off than the one before it.

Thanks to some judicious use of carb-cleaner, they cleaned up nicely, but does ethanol ever do a job on mechanical fuel delivery systems!  Fortunately, if I stick with super unleaded from most stations in Canada, it means I’m not running any in this old bike from now on.


I run super in my bikes anyway because they’re very fuel efficient anyway so it doesn’t cost much and, at least on the Tiger, the power commander means I can maximize power out of it.  For the Honda or any other carb fueled bike, you should be running super just to stay away from the ethanol.


Today I’m going to pull the tops of the carbs and have a look at the state of things (I’m hoping better than below) and finish cleaning them.  I’m also going to see if I can fix that broken choke pin on carb 4 or else I’m going to have to track down the part.  Bikebandit has it for $50US, but no one else seems to have one available.


There are other bits and pieces in this poorly looked after carb that are suspect.  Rather than use boot clamps to attach the carb to the engine, the muppet who owned it before me appears to have put some kind of rubber sealant on them and attempted to ‘glue’ them to the block.  This is stupid in all sorts of ways.  Bits of this rubber seal would deteriorate in the gasoline rich air-fuel mix and get sucked into the engine, and there is no mechanical connection ensuring the carbs are tight and leak free to the engine.  For a system that runs on vacuum, this is a disaster.


The boots have cleaned up nicely, so I also need to source some ring clamps for them.  The Honda specific ones are hard to find, but I’m hoping I can find some aircraft grade ones that are an engineering match and easier to source.  Oetiker Clamps, ironically based in Alliston where the Honda came from, do some nice, high quality options that I should be able to fit.


So much of mechanics come back to common sense.  The guy who owned this before seems to have had a startling lack of it.  I’m hoping for $1200+$500 in parts I can get this Honda humming and ride it for a year before seeing if I can double my money on it (unless we bond).  Safetied bikes of similar vintage with twice the mileage are going for four grand.  Even with all the work done so far, the bike hasn’t cost me a penny in parts and I may be within spitting distance of sorting out this abused Fireblade.

NOTES:

One of the tricky bits of working on old bikes is getting the documentation you need to work on them accurately.  The internet is a gold mine for this.  If you’re working on a late ’90s Honda CBR900RR Fireblade, you’ll find this handy:

1996/7 Honda CBR900RR Owner’s Manual:  https://mototribu.com/constructeur/honda/1996/1000cbr/doc/revuetechnique_900rr.pdf


It has lots of good technical graphics in addition to all the specs you need.


***

I was also able to source the Haynes Manual for this bike from Fortnine on sale for only $35.  Most other places were over $40US, so finding that on sale was a good first step in this project.


At the moment I’ve got emails out to The Bike Yard in Caledon and Oetiker Clamps in Alliston.  With any luck I can source the bits I need and have this Honda purring even before the snow starts to fly, then I can spend the winter sorting out the other fluids and maintenance before it hits the road in the spring.

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The front wheel is off to replace the speedometer gear housing.

So far the cost in parts has been only about $85 for a new speedometer gear from my local Kawi dealer: Two Wheel Motorsport.  Other than that it’s been a matter of checking connections and adjusting some poorly run throttle cables.

The gas gauge (reading low/inaccurately) was a loose electrical connection under the tank, cleaned up and connected properly it took about five minutes.  The temperature gauge was similar, just cleaning connections at the sensor (on the left side of the radiator) resolved that.

The speedo was a bit of a puzzle.  I got a new cable assuming the old one has seized (only about ten bucks), but it didn’t resolve the issue.  Putting a drill on the cable had the speedometer showing 70km/hr accurately.  The odometer and trip meter both register too, so it wasn’t an issue with the gauges.  I looked at the speedo gear housing in the front hub and it didn’t spin even when the wheel was.  Robert on the Two Wheel parts desk said these seize up if not lubricated well – they also seize up if the bike wasn’t run for a while (as mine wasn’t).  He said to make sure I grease the end well when I install the new one.

Well lubed and routed properly, the throttle cable snaps back perfectly.

The new part should be here Friday.  The local dealer cost about five bucks more than online, but didn’t charge me thirty plus bucks in shipping and customs costs, so that’s a clear win for buying OEM parts from your local dealer.

The sticking throttle was a matter of taking the cable ends apart at the handlebar and lubing and re-routing them properly – the return cable didn’t look like it was installed properly on the higher-rise custom bars on the bike.  After lubing the cables and cleaning the handlebar mechanism I routed the return cable in the proper spot behind the pull cable.  It was tricky getting it all back together again, but once it was done up the throttle was tight, smooth and snapped back like a champ.

I’m hoping to have the speedo done in the next couple of days and then put the bike together for a safety next week.