TOPIC:

Wow! How time flies, when you're having fun and while you were having all that fun, I was stuck in life-moving agony. Yup. Since we last spoke at length, the better half decided she wanted to move. So, in between all the rest of daily life I hadda find the time to pack up all our schtuff into the truck and haul it down the road a ways.
Alas, I'm bitchin' when in fact I am happy about it. I don't know if you noticed in any of the recent pictures but whenever I have been working on the KZombie (or any of the Kaw's), I've been doing it all on the garage floor. Our last house had a garage conversion done to it before we got it and so there was no drive-in garage. Just a garage-sized room. Thus, the space became a big, hairy unorganized storage Twilight Zone - like where schitt goes in and is never seen from again. Until I yell "Hey Hun? Where's the (insert something you can't do without right this moment).
Whatever. Moving is part of life and I moved all our life to a more comfortable space that included for me a double car garage with an actual garage door and all to become my play zone. Lots of room for all the bikes and even a couple of workbenches. Well, just one workbench so far but another is coming soon. A mobile one no less.

Ok. Back on track. All my lovely or ignored Kaws are safe in their new space. So it's 2 days ago and I'm still waiting on that dang machinist to finish the cylinder head work. KZombie's mostly dismantled engine sitting lonely on the garage floor, reminds me daily I'm a putz and shoulda' taken the head somewhere else maybe. So I call the machine shop and ask Wut up G? Any wurd on my motorcycle's two cylinder heads? They tell me I have to come in and see "the motorcycle guy". Uh oh. That can't be good. So yesterday after moving the last of the required furniture, I take a quick trip over to the machine shop...
Remember about, um? feels like a month ago but prolly more like 2 weeks, I took KZombie's head in (Hey! my KZombie has no head! Definitely not cool for a Zombie!) and after the gave it a bath, he discovered the valves were bent. Well, some of the valves were bent. So I drew back and punted, finding another complete cylinder head online and took it in. "Here man. Here's another whole head, already been ultrasonically cleaned and everything. Use this one instead. But it turns out after the machinist looked into it, that my original head was in better shape (lower mileage/hours, less wear on the guides and seats). So he asked me to make an executive decision - wait longer to re-do the last head after I get new valve guides etc or he could put KZombie's original head together in a couple of days. I already took him new Viton valve seals and between the two heads he had a complete set of valves. So that happened. A couple more days doesn't include weekends of course but soon....soon.
So what's a lad to do? Idle hands and all being the devil's playground... I decided to clean up all the parts laying all over the place at the old garage:




I packed up all the parts that were carefully laid out to remind my lame brain where and how they went back together and chunked'em all into a big tub. No rhyme, no reason. Just get the stuff consolidated in my new garage.

Today:
3:30am...
4:00am...
4:30am...
Screw this. I'm not sleeping anyway. Obviously, I needa' do something. Stumbled through the dark like a church mouse to the coffee maker and then out to the garage in my PJ's. Swig o' the java and spark up a cigarette and started cleaning up the wheels. That's something I can do half asleep. No brains required. Just elbow grease.
The wheels were pretty oxidized from their careful aging process in that field and while scrubbing down the bike a week ago did wonders, it didn't solve the oxidation:


So I scrubbed away at the wheels and it made a great difference in their appearance. Here you can see left side scrubbed down with wire brushes and right side ignored more:


By the time the sun had risen, I had managed to scrub up both wheels. Funny how the front wheel looks almost presentable, yet the rear wheel lost almost all of it's paint:


I'm going to repaint them of course. The decision is to use a slightly metallic black paint which will look pretty much like the front wheel does above. The frame is going to be painted the same eventually.

I cranked up another cup of joe and looked around for something else to do and I remembered that the front forks I ordered to replace KZombies rusted ones, had been delivered the day I was moving all the bikes! Fire up another smoke and setup the new workbench for something fun! Oh Joy!
Masochist. The definition in the dictionary is wrong! It doesn't include anything like this:


How long do you have to stare at those pages before they start to make sense? Another cup of java...
I set to it. It took me all day to swap out all the parts from four forks into two useable units:
This was the ticket to remove the top plugs. Vrrzzzz! Off!


I built-up some adapters to hold an 8mm allen wrench that I cut down with my angle grinder:

This removed the bottom allen bolt nearly painlessly, once I also concocted this up:


That contraption is a 1/2" drive ratchet with a few extensions, a 9/16" socket and a #6 screw extractor. The screw extractor idea came from another member on this site who suggested it as "worked for me".





and .... it worked for me too!

I had identified all the parts as belonging to the new doner set or the original set because the doner pair were from another KZ650 model. The lower forks had a slightly different mounting position for the front fender, which meant I had to keep KZombie's original lowers and swap-in the doner upper tubes BUT given that bottom of the internal piston rides against the lower while the top rides inside the upper, I made the delusion, erm, I mean decision, that I needed to keep the pistons (Not what the FSM calls this part) with the upper tubes, but use the lower segments from the original lower tubes. Yeah. I made it rocket science when it probably doesn't matter one dang bit but Hey! I was only operating on half a pot of coffee by that point so it made sense to me.
End result:



This was about 4:30pm. I had soaked through a whole roll of paper towels and only had to refill the forks with 190cc of SAE 15 fork oil and then I could zip the top plugs in and install the seal and dust cover. Now where did I put that fork oil? Oh yeah. That's right. I'm a moron and forgot to buy that inconsequential component to this puzzle. I drove all over town at 4:45pm to any automotive supply store and discovered something - MOTORcycles are not considered AUTOmotive. At least none of the popular auto parts stores here carry fork oil and ... Waco Motorsports closes in 3, 2, 1...

Yup. Another fine job by your Treasury man in action. Another phase of work sitting almost complete. But, Hey! That motorsports shop opens again in ... 3 days so.. Fricken, fracken, friction.

Dearly beheaded, we gather here to mourn a wonderful headless, forkless, wheel-less, awesome machine:

Better to wait on the fork oil. You'll need to pump it and fill the lowers. If you fill the top they won't compress. Hydraulic oil works in a pinch and they have it at a AP store.
Steve

Hey Steve!
Seriously man? I can't just pour it into the top of the cylinder? I am so totally PO'd to learn this. I had two manuals on the bench through the whole process and didn't know this. The FSM only says to fill it with ... and the Clymer too but it had a picture on the page showing a guy just pouring the fork oil down into the upper tube. They even mention how a baby bottle is useful because it actually measures fluid in the range of 190cc. LOL

So this means I have to use like hypo syringe and inject 190cc into that teeeeeny screw hole by the axle end? Dayum. This sure wasn't intuitive in any way shape or form.

On the brighter side. I got to spend a couple of hours in the garage this evening and decided to prep the fork lowers for painting. Originally, I was thinking of painting them gloss black, like my 550a's forks are. I kinda' dig that look. So I set to scuffin' them up with 120 to ease-out the deeper scratches and moved up through 400 grit but then I couldn't stop myself and just kept going through to 1000 grit and finished with some buffing:



Still needs a wee bit more attention to remove the fine scratches but it was getting dark and I still don't have sufficient lighting over my new workbench so I couldn't see how I was doing during the buffing.

Guess, I've changed my mind though. I'm going to stick with the polished forks now. I still like shiny metal a wee bit more than the sporty look of the painted fork lowers on the 550a.

I tried it that way the last time I did my seals. HARD AS A ROCK. Opened the caps and let them bottom. When I raised it up, it sucked enough oil into the dampers. Lost some. I use a baby snot sucker with a piece of tubing then use a piece of wire to measure the level.I should have primed them on the bench.
Steve

Ha! I was just about to "Thank You" for the advise Steve, when I noticed this:



So I hadda' screen cap that for posterity before clicking 'Thank You'... The devil made me do it! LOL

HOLY SHT. THANK YOU.
Steve

Hey there Cats and Kittens!

It's been a busy week here in the KZombie mortuary, I mean, garage!
Sadly I have no pictures yet because I was OCD and just did schitt in a furious two how window each night after I got home from work and never thought to stop and snap a pic.
The results of the week are my engine sans cylinder head made it's way up onto the workbench with new shop lights to support my efforts!
I managed to scrub down the engine and got to the point of polishing casings and temporarily attaching them. Meanwhile, the nice postman stopped by daily dropping off some wonderful new parts. I got new tires one day. A big box of primer and paint the next day. Steering bearings and wheel bearings. I dropped by the local HF and picked up a little media blaster to begin stripping the frame down this weekend and hopefully make it as far as painting the frame and the wheels.
I took the wheels and new tires into Waco Motorsports today and they slapped the new hoops on my stripped wheels. I'll be picking them up in the morning as soon as they open.
So I was feeling so good about finally getting to break-out the paint that I called back again to the machine shop and asked whether there had been any progress on my cylinder headS that they've had now for 1 month? Much to my surprise the woman told me my cylinder heads are ready to be picked up! AND since this machine shop is actually open on Saturdays, I'll be swinging by there after I pickup the wheels and finally returning KZombie's various body parts to the same place!

I'm totally stoked! The weather here is supposed to be great this weekend so I'll be a mediablasting, priming and painting fool and if time allows and Mother doesn't insist on doing something else, I'll try to get one of the cylinder heads mated back onto the engine. Fingers crossed.

I have to say, picking paint has taken me a lot longer than I thought it would. My better half kept telling me to paint it stock color which I like but I kept thinking I'd rather go with maybe Red or even a modern take on Kawasaki Green. Ultimately though, I went with this:



It's House of Kolor's "Stratus Blue 402". It's metallic and pretty close to the stock color KZombie was born with. The difference is I will be painting the front fender and I'm still waffling on this but I think I want to paint the headlamp bucket, ears and guage bodies too.
I also picked up a some white gold for the accent striping which I'm going to freehand onto the panels eventually. Kind of swooping french curves along the tank, down onto the side panels and finally up onto the duck tail in a close approximation of the original but solid instead of twin, thin lines.
The wheels and frame are going black (a nod to stock again) but I chose to go with a HOK Black pearl metallic. It's super clean looking and from a distance nobody will know any differently but up close, under the correct lighting, the pearl, metallic really pops. All the paints are 2K format.

So here's hoping for smooth condition in the garage (and back driveway for media blasting) this weekend! With luck and the creek don't rise, KZombie will be sportin' new clothes soon. I'll also finally get to put the front forks back on it and make it a roller again.

wrenchmonkey wrote: On the brighter side. I got to spend a couple of hours in the garage this evening and decided to prep the fork lowers for painting. Originally, I was thinking of painting them gloss black, like my 550a's forks are. I kinda' dig that look. So I set to scuffin' them up with 120 to ease-out the deeper scratches and moved up through 400 grit but then I couldn't stop myself and just kept going through to 1000 grit and finished with some buffing:

Still needs a wee bit more attention to remove the fine scratches but it was getting dark and I still don't have sufficient lighting over my new workbench so I couldn't see how I was doing during the buffing.

Guess, I've changed my mind though. I'm going to stick with the polished forks now. I still like shiny metal a wee bit more than the sporty look of the painted fork lowers on the 550a.

Hey Monkey love your thread, certainly entertaining. If you need to light up that garage go to Walmart and buy their $40 LED 48" shop lights. Makes it like day light in my garage.

Thanks Jon. Funny enough, just today, after I dropped the wheels and new tires off, I stopped by the home hardware store to pickup some recessed lighting and was noodling all the shop lights instead.

I've got 3 florescent bulb lights around the work bench presently (and this is a vast improvement over ... darkness) but it's still leaving the worker bee side in shadow. So I know I gotta hang something above/behind me. It'll be especially important when it comes time to shoot paint and clear coat. More lighting is needed, fo rizzle!

I am a BIG LED fan. They are super bright, use less power and I don't have to buy and replace bulbs and starters. Not that I have to worry about it here in warmy and sunny AZ, but they don't have to warm up in the winter either.

Whoa! That was fun. NOT!

Anyone ever done any sandblasting in their lives? The last time I did, I was like in my 30's and it was a whole chassis in my driveway. So as I discovered KZombie's frame was pretty tatty and rusty here and there, I decided I was going to sandblast it out in the driveway. Well, that day was today.
But wait! Rewind back to this morning. My usual coffee in hand, I'm surfing the forum here waiting for my eyesight to catch up with the rising sun and I remembered - TODAY is the day my new tires can be picked up! Oh and joy oh bliss! My cylinder head is finally ready at the machine shop and ready to be picked up too!
So it was with great speed and little grace that I put it in gear and got to gettin'. First stop was the machine shop and I had a little discussion with the owner. He apologized because my cylinder head was actually ready on Tuesday but "somebody" forgot to call me and let me know. Whatever, I'm just happy to finally have it back. He reiterated that I got the first cylinder head done, not the second one which I supplied because the first one (KZombie's born-with, cylinder head) was in the best condition with little to no valve guide wear present when compared to the replacement head. So that's cool. It reassures me that this old bike wasn't terribly abused in it's life other than the leaving it in an open field for several decades part.
Then it was off to the the motorsports shop to pick up my wheels and new tires. That was uneventful. They were waiting for me at the service desk. A quick Cha-Ching! on the card and I was outta there! Last stop was the home hardware store for 4 bags of sand. Another bueno - the 50lb bags were cheap. Like under $5 each.
Finally back at the ranch, I unloaded everything and while rubbing my hands together like a child at Christmas, I reviewed my good fortune:

Yummy! A nice clean and rebuilt cylinder head.


Some scrumptious rubber on the wheels.


I read on the forum here about the different tires folks were using or considering and while I appreciate high performance, corner-grabbing, Z-rated rubber. I also realized that I have champagne tastes with a beer budget. So I went for the best deal I could find as opposed to the best tires. These did the trick. Good looking (as tires go, I reckon) and in my dwindling budget.

So the day was off to a good start. I looked at KZombie's engine, waiting patiently for it's head to be reattached:

The engine is pretty darn clean at this point with just a couple more casings to shine up the old fashioned way - with lots of elbow grease and a little sandpaper selection.
Finally, I setup the little sandblaster out in the driveway and perched KZombie's aged frame upon a small worksurface:

Woot! By dinner I should have this puppy in primer and fingers crossed it'll be getting painted tomorrow!
Well, that was the idea... the ideal idea. Then I put on the gear - hat, mask, glasses and gloves and commenced to blastin'.
Within about 45 seconds I remembered something about sandblasting - IT SUCKS! Fricken sand is bouncing off me every which way. It's getting in my ears, down my shirt and slowly filling up my shoes. Ack! Why did I think this was a good idea?
Well, I'm in the penny, in for the pound at this point so I pressed-on. Embrace the suck! Embrace the suck! Just get'er done damnit!

So by about 90 seconds into the process, I stopped and un-geared myself so I could see how it was going:


Ummmm, yeah... Not so good.
What else I had forgotten since I was a 30-something having fun with vintage car sandblasting was: I don't have that awesome compressor here. I just had the weeny one made to shoot nails. Darn it! I pulled the media gun trigger and it would blast like crazy, doing an awesome job...for about 5 seconds and then the wimpy compressor would weez and cough into gear and try to keep up. It was like watching paint dry though. Moving the nozzle about 1/8" every 10 seconds just to get the paint to chip a wee bit.
Well, that was about 1/10 of the first bag down. Take a choke break. Swig of my soda. Let the wimpy compressor run for 2 minutes to catch-up.. Rinse. Repeat.
Slow-forward to 3:30pm. My driveway is now a cool summertime beach (the wife's going to need to deflate the tires in her car a little to drive-in the driveway over the sand dune). After about an hour of blasting. Still on my first bag of sand. I kinda' changed gears on the process and decided to just spot-blast any rusty spots and then kinda' wave-over all the painted surfaces to rough them up for priming instead of trying to take the whole frame back to bare metal as originally thought.
By 4:00pm I had detailed the bike, flipped it over and back and over and up to blow-out all the sand and dust from the many crevices designed to catch and hold this media perfectly. Another long hard stare... Underwhelming results.

So I broke-out the angle grinder and slapped on a 120 grit flap disc and commenced to bouncing my knuckles off every sharp edge I could find. Bahhzzzzzzttt! Whack! Groan Bahzzzzzzt!!! Whack! Ouch!
So several minutes and 3 fingers wrapped tightly in paper towels to stem the blood from getting all over my grinder and coming-clean bike frame and it was done:


Yeah. I know. "Done" is now a relative term. When I said "it was done" what I really meant was I was done. I hand sanded out all the edges and painted areas with some 150g to give the primer something more to grab onto. But that ain't happening today that's for sure. Now I gotta go sweep up the beach dune and hopefully find a way to wash-out all the black paint soot and beach sand from, well, from everywhere that is moving with me still.

Bandaged-fingers crossed. I'll get the frame completely torn down tomorrow and hung up for some priming. Oh wait! Tomorrow i Mother's Day! Did I remember to tell my significant other what a wonderful gal she has been all these years? Did I manage to cull the beach in our driveway down to a low mound that can be survived by a hyper-miler type car that she had to leave in the street earlier? OK. So maybe frame priming will be a little more delayed than originally planned. OK. Gotta go now. Can't forget to order flowers either.