After struggling for a bit with the clutch-pack, I got the transmission mounted last night. I had planned on getting the housing sparkling clean for installation but several bottles of WD-40 and painstaking scrubbing later I was ready to just bolt the damn thing back on. The clutch-facing portion of the transmission ended up fairly clean. The housing is mostly clean of oil but it has a dullness that can only be removed with hours of cleaning with an array of chemicals. Meh. Someone said "Let the patina build, it adds character to the bike." At the moment, I'm inclined to agree. The thing is meant to be ridden. It's only going to get dirty again, anyway.
There is much talk on the Internet about lubing the transmission splines. So I did that, with a toothbrush. I used Honda Moly 60.
I was tightening the top bolts when I noticed that there was a good centimeter of space between the bottom portion of the bell housing and the transmission. Tightening the bottom bolts did not move the transmission closer. My Clymer's instructs one to fully mate the transmission to the engine BEFORE tightening the bolts, to avoid damaging the splines. Whoops. I loosened everything and pushed on the transmission but it would not budge any closer to the engine. I considered grabbing a hammer and a wooden drift but then I remembered reading something about this procedure on the Internet. I used a socket wrench on the rotor to crank the engine over while I pushed on the bottom of the transmission and, boom, instant success.
I installed the clutch-arm and played around a little with the adjustment. I decided to research the adjustment procedure a little more on the Internet because my Clymer's was a bit confusing on the subject. My understanding is that you want 2mm of free-play at the lever and 1mm of clutch-arm free-play at the transmission.
I was getting excited about installing the swingarm but then I remembered I still had a battery-holder issue to deal with. At some point, acid dripped from a battery and corroded the paint of the battery-holder. The rubber battery-holder mounts had mostly disintegrated and their fasteners rusted. It was sort of surprising that the battery had still been secured, actually, as only the two top mounts were still intact.
I had already cleaned and painted the battery-holder but forgotten about the corresponding area on the bike. To remove the old rubber mounts, I've been cutting into them with a Dremel, in order to be able to get purchase on the metal underneath with pliers or a screwdriver. Then I crank on the nut on the other side of the mount to break it free of the rust and corrosion. It's not particularly difficult but it is time-consuming and my Dremel tends to run its battery out quickly (I should probably purchase a corded rotary tool).
Most of the time I have spent while working on this bike is on cleaning, scrubbing and painting, scraping old gaskets, wrestling with frozen bolts. People talk about how a certain procedure should only take three or four hours but that doesn't take into account the time spent on restorative tasks, which can be considerable, particularly if that part of the bike hasn't been dug into recently (or not since it rolled off the factory floor).
And this makes me feel better about my decision to not take it to a shop. A shop isn't going to spend hours cleaning up your battery holder. Not unless you want to pay them a shop rate for that sort of thing. I'm taking a risk digging into this thing myself, just one stupid mistake away from costing myself a pile of money or ending up with a dismantled carcass that cannot be put back together in my driveway and can only be transported in the bed of a pickup. But I'm learning more about the bike and I'm giving attention to long-neglected components.
I have to figure out how to strike a balance. When the transmission was off and I was waiting for the clutch back from Southland, I noticed a few metal-exposing chips out of the paint on the frame and I thought, semi-seriously, "Well, I could just pull the engine and the forks and a few other bits and get this thing powder-coated". And if I had a full shop to work in and store all the bits and pieces, I might have just continued unbolting things. But I don't want a disassembled motobike. I want a motorbike that I can ride.
So I have to remember to keep perspective. Fix the things that are easy to fix or need to be fixed and leave the rest. I will never give this bike a full restoration. It is meant to be ridden.
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