Speed bump

Everything was going great. I was moving forward, the bike was coming together, and all was good.

...and then, I found this:

Those dogs are junk, fork is possibly reusable, drum is possibly reusable. I tried to find another one of these gears everywhere. I even bought up a whole new basket full of 750 transmission off ebay trying to get one. Same exact problem with that one.

But, with a little help from the good folks over at the SOHC4 Forum I've finally got one and after several months of complete dead stop on this project. I'm charging ahead again.

Life is good.

Red Coat, the other kind

I've become just a tad obsessed with the TZ color scheme. I want to paint everything red and white, and I'm going to start here.

I couldn't get the frame to stop rusting since I've been grinding on it, so I decided instead of touching up all the bare metal with black rattle cans I'd go ahead and shoot the thing red. I have every intention of redoing the paint because I still have to do some frame chopping ahead of me. We'll call this a mockup, a test to confirm the color scheme.

 Stripped

I was working on a friends bike and went ahead and shot my tank at the same time. Took a few layers of primer and a few days to get it all smooth on the top, but I'm pretty happy with the results.

Once the thing's mostly back together I'll take a nice side shot and play with the graphics until I get something that's worth shooting on the tank.

75 cent coat

After Junior welded up my tank there was still a bit of crud shaking around in there so to knock it around a bit I added 75 pennies and shook the living daylights out of it. It's a good idea to keep track of how many you put in and try to get that many out again at the end.

Next up was a good rinse with solvent and acetone, after which I needed to make sure it was good and dry.

Then the Red Kote went in. This stuff is new to me, but Junior swears by it and he's done a lot more bikes than I have and usually knows his stuff. In the past I've only used Por15s tank coating (that's what's in LoudBike) and have had no trouble with it, but this stuff's a bit thicker, and the 750 tank's a bit rougher. So I'm hoping this will take care of the couple of pin holes that are in the tank.

 And then it all comes out.

 Like red candy in there.