occupied..

alright, i'm a bit in a pickle here..
all of this:

still has to become a complete bike before the BigTwin bike show next Thursday.
and i only have the Wednesday right before that Thursday to make that pile of parts into Daddy Cool again.
ow shit.. that will be an all nighter to finish the damn machine.
i had planned to do the job last week but i got occupied. the FrankenPan (European) gave some grief again.
an coolant manifold leaked and later on broke. and just to give me some more pleasure it was the one the was the hardest to get to.
things to remove: fairing (a shitload of plastic), fake fueltank, air filter box, air box, carbs,the actual fuel tank, cables, some rubber covers and after all that work..

the whole shabang had to go back again.. and i'll be damned, it wouldn't go easy. carbs in double "V" will not cooperate into the manifolds. and the airbox thought the same. so i ended up taking the carbs apart to fit the airbox to the carbs and after that fighting the whole setup as one part back on the manifolds.
needless to say... it took the whole day... the day that was planned for Daddy Cool.
a well.. one built day remaining!

frankenpipe (aka Peters Pan)

today my colleague Peter came by to have me check his bike, he had some problems with his water temp gouge.

it's a Honda Pan European and he uses it as daily, any weather driver, so it is somewhat important that he could keep an eye on the engine temps.
before he arrived at the Garage i could hear him coming from far.. not a sound you'd expect of Pan European..
ah well, i would check that out later..
first up: the water temp sender. as i screwed the thing out the radiator no water came with it.. ouch.. the sender is in the lower parts of the radiator, so there has to be water surrounding it! and it has to pour out when you remove the sender...
that's an easy fix for the sender... fill the engine with some water again, so it's surrounded with water, and hope there was enough in it before to save the bike from serious damage. it seems no serious damage had been done.

now let's check out that loud exhaust sound!
after a short "finger feel" i could sink my whole finger in several holes.. wtf?
so off with the rightside pipes!
now that's odd.. it's a Honda so it's build to perfection right? wrong! the headers are stainless steel but the collector (which is a integrate part of the headers) is of plain steel. so that part was rusted to oblivion!

and trust me.. the other side was even worse!
but as long as the headers were of the bike i could always do some patching up, bastard style!! (my colleague is also a poor fucker like me and a new exhaust system is just to expensive)
so i took some scrap sheet metal, a hammer fired up the welder and started forming and welding..

so after a little while the Franken pipe was ready!

at first i thought i could patch up the holes with small patches, but the collector was to worn out, the metal was way to thin to weld something tight. so on the side where i started it looked like Frankenstein..

for the other side i started making a brand new side of the collector and welded it to the last thick parts of the collector.
also the outlet pipe was rotting away on the welds so i tackled that with some metal sheets to.

the Frankenpipe is air tight again and the Pan is a little more quit!
i used 0,8 MM (MiliMeters) sheet, so i think the collector will survive the bike!

something different

a hole in the floor of the Garage was bugging me for ages.
but with always something to do to bikes and having the Garage cluttered with bikes didn't help with finding time and making space to tackle the hole.
with some bikes out of the Garage i finally had time and space! i bought a 25KG bag of sand, thinking it was more than enough and removed the tiles who were sunken down.

one hour later all 25 KG's of sand had gone in the hole and the floor was straight again..

wow, it will take some getting used to fact that the bike lift will stand straight and can be moved..
right on!

late spring cleaning..

i was that time again..
time to make The Garage a little more tidy again.
had some others coming over for some work on their bikes and with all the junk laying around i couldn't turn my ass to work on another bike.

i almost forgot i had tiles on the floor...
well.. i got some room again to work on other bikes, so next one is rolling in tomorrow. (little job though should take one hour max, so i hope i can do some work on my own bikes)