Here is where not to go.

[cowboyz]

it is just nice to finish a ride without everything on the bike rattling loose and ya fairings not all chipped and fucked. Oh yeah, you guys dont have fairings.

[Bonez]

it is just nice to finish a ride without everything on the bike rattling loose and ya fairings not all chipped and fucked. Oh yeah, you guys dont have fairings.

Why not street fighter the GSX for those more, umm, adventerous rides.........................

[Bonez]

Some times it's easyer to ride faster on the gravel than it is to ride slower! Followed one guy doing about 10kph!! Christ, ya cant even ride on the tarseal at that speed! Yeah, madguzzi cooks a mean BBQ, but there's always too much smoke!!!!

WHAT!! You mean to tell me the V50 doubles as barby? The bloody crafty ITIES.

[cowboyz]

errr. no.

[Bonez]

Gave the chains and sprocket a clean with diesol, brush and a rag yesterday. Had a part bottle of ATF I use in the bikes forks, so soaked the chain in it. It has good detergent properties so I figured its going to do more good than harm. No new battery yet, but will get one in the next fortnight. Will take it for a quick spin then to fling off any access then lightily grease/transmission oil it. Only needed a half a turn on the tension adjustment bolts to take up the slack.

With the tank off it was a good time to loosen the rocker cover caps. Now these usually get overtightened and can stick, do to ali to ali contact and corrosion, to the rocker cover. Didn't have a 24mm 6 sided socket handy so I used the Gertys toolkit spanner with a 8 inch length of ali tube, the extention that came in the kit is far too small and norrow for serious leverage. 12 point ones tend to round the caps off too easily if they are realy tight-20 years of '76 cb550 experience you see. Firstly I applied WD40 around the edges of the caps and a sharp tap around the edges of the caps hex first. Gently tapping the ali extension keeping the spanner resonbably level managed to loosen them ok. My intention is to check the valve clearances in the near future as I have no idea when it was last done.

Got the change of ownership for the dohc CB750F project yesterday as well.
Also discovered the GSX750EX shocks dampers where sticking a bit. Visited Doug on it and we both watch it rise around 2 inches while nattering. Gave us
both a hell of a fright. Turns out around a a third of a teaspoon of crap had gathered around the LH shock seal, with about half that from around the RH shock. Guess it got over the time it was off the road, around 10 years or so I believe. This explains the park bench, bit like the MkIII I test road back in 1993, feel it had when riding it. Quite harse over road corragations it was too. Also the tendency to weave a bit at low speed. Still crank up to 200ks + in a straight line ok though, not bad for a 25 yea old cickle.

One shock was obviously working better than the other. Loosened the crud off with application of a little ATF oil. The ATF should soften up the seals a bit as well. After a few days you can now compress the rear shocks and they rebound almost instantly. No need to replace them now.