Saturday June 14th 2025

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Saturday June 14th 2025


This workshop session was a quiet one.  At its peek there were just seven of us!  A huge thank you to Gareth for listing the contents of tool trolleys one to four and for Allan doing the same with the newer green tool chest. It was a huge help and by doing the red tool trolley myself I was able to complete the set so we now know exactly what is where (For a week anyway!)

Many thanks also to Jo for collecting and bringing the new project bike into the workshop. It was a Honda CBR1000 that its donor Paul had owned for around 20 years.  It hadn't run properly for a number of years but the bike was in generally sound condition and would make a good project especially for those wanting to learn how to overcome the impact that time stood still can have on a bike and its carburettors



Also many thanks to Jo for providing us with temporary use of her starter pack (I hope that’s what you call it.)  Guess where it came in handy!!  Yes the Mash and it turned the engine considerably faster than any of the batteries in the workshop.   For the very first time we saw signs of life from the Mash. Including sounds as if the engine was trying to fire up and a lovely sheet of flame shot from the exhaust. (I know I get pleasure from strange things.) Had the starter pack been able to maintain its enthusiasm for a little longer I think we may have seen a miracle!  We certainly saw  the petrol vapour/air mix being ignited by the spark plug for the first time.   That reminded me I needed to put one of them Starter pack things on our shopping list.




Roger and Ioin got to work replacing the front wheel on the Suzuki GSF1200, Bandit its brand new front forks having been fitted at the previous session. That then flagged up a new problem, the brakes were binding on the discs just a little too much for comfort. The brakes were four piston calipers and as we found, it is tricky to get the four pistons out if you cant pump them out before taking the brake pipe off the caliper. The pistons are physically quite a small diameter so the usual tricks to get them out wouldn’t work. A little corrosion had set in around the exposed end of the pistons that we were able to check during the session so a new set of pistons would be a good investment.



I had purchased a CG125 inlet manifold as it seemed to be the most readily available replacement for the one on the Jialonda trials bike project which had begun to perish.  However although the holes in the CG125 manifold lined up with the bolt holes on the cylinder head, it didn't possess the same curvature as the Jialonda.  This meant that the carburettor couldn’t be fitted into it and the CG125 item would have to go back. The only positive out of all of that was that was that we could see that the perishing was still superficial and hadn’t reached the inner surface of the manifold.

Allan and I pondered whether or not to use the fuel tank liner on the Jialonda’s fuel tank to keep the muck at bay.  However the kit comes with three separate products the first of which is a rust treatment with a recommendation that it be left in the tank for around 4 hours, even if it were a brand new tank.  The instructions that recommended leaving it in the tank even longer or better still overnight for tanks that have corroded.  They also recommended that one product immediately follows the other, meaning trying to do it in one session wouldn’t work.  Someone would have to take the tank home.