back on two wheels!

bearings are in and she's back on rubber. Maybe my next project should be insulating the garage.

I wanted to post pics with that statement, but Shozu's not cooperating, so without further adieu:

Went together a lot harder than it came apart, everything's tight now... in a good way

When I had Ceasar do my powdercoat I left the masking a little short

so that I could sand a nice clean edge on it

I adore this color combo

tools

And wouldn't you know it, it almost looks like a bike again

I hung the fairing from the fz600 on it just so that I would get used to it with a nose.

Also I would have taken some better pics of it, but the garage is a mess because it's too cold to spend any time out there to tidy it up, and this was literally as far away as I could get without opening the garage door.

My favorite color!

It all took a lot longer than it was supposed to, but happy day indeed. I got my wheels back from powdercoat.

I started the stripping process with aerosol aircraft stripper. I didn't have high hopes for it because by their nature aerosols are usually just really diluted and ineffective versions of the real thing. But it worked fantastically for the first bit. I also tried a couple of different paste strippers and eventually decided it was all just too much work and took them to my powder guy and asked him to use his secret (biodegradable) formula which worked brilliantly, but then it was an issue with the pots that he had. His shop is set up to do small panels and electronics boxes so he didn't have anything that he could just soak them in completely. Several days of this went by (he's doing this job for me as a favor so it was back-burner-ed and I wasn't really in a position to push the issue) and eventually I took them back to finish them out in my sandblaster.

I also had to get them back from him because I wanted to sand them down a bit, I removed several casting IDs from the face of the spokes and, as you may be able to see here I smoothed out some casting seams.

I returned them to him last night, masked them up and picked them up this morning.

So exciting!

Took them up to Cycle Gear and had them swap the still brand new tire off the old bent wheel

Sadly though they accidently ordered me another rear tire instead of a front so I've got to wait for the new front to arrive before I can get her rolling again. If I just wanted something simple like a Pilot Power I could have just grabbed one and been out the door... I've always got to have the stuff that no one has ever heard of and doesn't stock.

Making a mess

I managed to track down a new rear wheel for the bike. Not the coveted eight spoke, but actually just a direct replacement for the original, just a lot less bent.

By the end, they'll be white, so I've got to get all the black powder off first. I pulled the front wheel last night:

By the end of this they'll all be white so I've got to get all the black off before getting started, aircraft stripper works its magic

Next, I'll be cleaning the garage, I've been working on the van a lot and everything's gone to chaos in my haste.

So fresh and so clean clean

It took me a while to clean off all the surfaces. The insides of the valve covers were the worst, they were taped off as there is a grooved surface that I didn't want to sand out. The powder built up on the tape and created a flange that had to be removed.

New gaskets and all, this all came with some good sticker shock, these new fangled motorcycles are expensive!

"Powd-air" (say it Frenchie!)

Just had a look at the sample part that he did for me. It's not exactly as I was expecting, but I think it will be really cool so I told him to go ahead with the rest of the parts. I was originally thinking of going with a brighter gold, but most of the real RC30s have these parts in black or at least a very dark bronze, so this is a little more true to form. Also some of them are a little beat up still and the texture will "smooth" them out nicely.

It's dark bronze BTW, it might look black in the pic.

Obviously I've got to sand off the gasket surfaces (powder sometimes leaves kind of a nasty mask edge so I had him only mask things that I couldn't sand clean)