Saturday June 28th
Saturday June 28th
Suzuki GSF1200 Bandit
At our workshop session Saturday June 28th Roger, Ioin
and Steve all worked on the Suzuki 1200 Bandit, the problem they were trying to
overcome was the dragging front brakes.
They pulled apart the front brake calipers and after a little difficulty
managed to extract the pistons and install a new set of pistons on the left
hand side . Once the brakes were back together the left hand front brake still dragged
too much but with some judicial fiddling it eventually freed up enough that we could
move to something else at the following session. The next thing we would be doing was to check
the valve clearances and the balance the bike’s four carburettors.
Ducati 250 cc single.
John made some excellent progress with
Graham’s help. John was waiting for rocker cover gaskets to come from Italy,
however Graham helped him make his own. Using nothing more than gasket paper, a
ball peen hammer, Stanley knife and scissors John cut out to very two nice
rocker cover gaskets. Graham then helped John aligned the ignition rotor of his
new electronic ignition and John set about wiring the ignition up properly.
Then when a battery was connected and the engine turned over using the rear
wheel a nice fat white spark jumped across by the electrodes of the spark plug.
Alan proved vital to the process of getting the spark going holding the jump
leads away from each other and away from the frame to prevent them from
shorting out. All that was needed now was a new clutch cable which was
something that John would have to make up himself. Because the bike doesn’t
have a kickstart bump starting it without a clutch cable, would mean being
unable to stop it to get off. Hopefully and the next session we would be able
to make up a new cable and finally hear the bike running.
Hoatian Arrow 125.
Phil helped Jose to start settling his bike helping him to remove various parts to clean them up and remove the corrosion where the bike had stood idle for so long. Andy residents paint sprayer, made an excellent job of respraying the footrest hangers with a lovely gloss black finish. This was the first time the bike had been worked on in our workshop and would need some more time spent to restore it to its former glory.
MASH 400 Dirtstar.
Graham continued his Battle with the Mash. We had bought a shiny new mains powered
battery charger with engine starting for facility but despite trying everything
we can think of it made no difference to the slow speed but the starter turned
the engine. In the end Graham resorted to emailing the manufacturers of the
starter to find out what we were doing wrong. Watch this space will it ever
run again?
Kawasaki Z2550 Scorpion.
Keiran continues his efforts to complete the final tidying up of the bike. Andy assisted with paintwork for some of the plastic trim. Keiran ran the engine and it ran and started very nicely to, apparently. So just a few more spare parts to go a little bit of paintwork and the bike will be ready.
Other workshop stuff...
The day was made more memorable by the absence of water in
the kitchen and in the toilet when we arrived. The water company had apparently
turned the water off having found a leak around the water metre in the road.
After a couple of phone calls Graham eventually managed to save the day and get
the water supply reinstated