78 Z1R Winter Project

Just don't get that sh!t anywhere near your plastic parts, or your skin. Ouch! Nice bike BTW. "It's hip to be square."

It's been a couple of busy weeks, I have gotten a lot done and I will try to get this thread up to date in the next few posts.

First, I got all of my bodywork sanded down and to my painter. I kind of lost track, but I think I have around 35 hours in this, mostly just because I tried to take it slow and not mess anything up.





Next, I pulled the head off and, other than the cam bearings , it looks pretty good in there.



Cylinder #1 is a little gunky, I think it was from a combination of leaking valve seals and a weak coil.



Stay tuned for more; Saturday I pulled my oil pan and and took a look around the transmission and crank, and today I pulled the engine out and have almost everything else off of the frame! :woohoo:

Looks like you have 35 hrs in the bodywork. Nice work. I bet your painter will want to give you a man-hug. No filler?

No man-hug from my painter :laugh:

But he is really happy with the prep.

The tank is perfect, there was no filler at all. One side of the fairing near where the turn signal goes actually had some filler under the factory paint. And the front fender had a few small spots covering the spot welds.

Here's and interesting tidbit on the factory paint; they used a white primer over the plastic and steel parts, and gray primer over the white fiberglass fairing. :huh:

The oil pan was much more difficult to break loose than I expected. It took some good whacks with a hammer and 2x4 before it tore the gasket clean in half leaving half on the pan and half on the crankcase for double the gasket scraping fun! :lol:

It looks like the oil that was at the very bottom was old; that stuff must stick in there pretty good because I changed the oil last spring before I started it up, and I only put about 500 miles on it. There was also a little sludge, but there were no big surprises and the oil pump screen was clean so I'm happy about that.



After some degreaser and a little time in the wash tub it looks much better!



Besides some light surface rust, everything in the crankcase looks good, no chipped teeth and I didn't see anything that looked bent.



One more post and I think I will have this thread pretty well caught up!

After a rather late start on Sunday I actually got a lot of work done. I guess one hour of dissasembly seems a lot more productive than an hour of sanding!

With the head off and my Dad on the other side, the engine came out easily. Since I was kind of dreading this part of the project I was really excited when it came out so nicely, and decided it was a Kodak...well, Sony - moment! :woohoo:
I'm also feeling good about getting the engine back in with out scratching up the frame.



Then the time seemed to fly by, and before I knew it I was almost down to a bare frame!

:laugh:

And after cleaning up the some of the parts off of the garage floor a bit...



Now I just need to pull the front end off, get the bearings out of the frame and swingarm, and degrease it a little before I send it off to the powdercoater.

Then I can get my engine stand built, and start cleaning, polishing, and generally restoring all of these parts I have in boxes! :laugh: :ohmy:

good job!
keep postin,

leon

531blackbanshee wrote:

good job!
keep postin,

leon

Thanks!
It's good to see that at least a few people are reading this, I was beginning to think I was just talking to myself! :laugh: :blush:

Anyway, today I pulled the front end off, got the fork lock out, and removed the old bearings from the steering stem and swing arm. Now I am pretty much down to a bare frame. I couldn't get the foot peg mounts to come out so I decided to leave them on and just mask them before powder coating.



Removing the bearings from the swing arm was harder than I expected.
First, I tried the metal rod method as suggested in the manual, but it was difficult to catch the small lip on the bearings and after whacking my knuckles a few good times I decided to try something else.

My second attempt was to use a heavy duty toggle (like the ones for drywall just a bit larger) to grab the inner lip of the bearings. After several variations with the toggle I ended up trying to beat on it with the metal rod from the first attempt which almost immediately caused the toggle to fall apart.

My third and final attempt was to grind two flat spots onto a washer that was a little smaller than the bearings. These flat spots let me slip the washer into the swing arm and turn it so that it caught the lip on the inside of the bearing. I then found the largest socket that would fit through the opposite bearings, 15 mm in my case, and put it on a long extension. Then I was able to tap the bearings out evenly from the opposite side.

Once the first side of bearings was out I just grabbed a bigger socket that contacted the bearing lip without the washer and tapped the other bearings out.

Here is a pic of my ultra-simple-bearing-driver-adapter. You can see it got beat up a bit from just removing the bearings on one side, but for the price and quantity needed for the job I'm ok with it being disposable!



Now I just need to talk to my powder coater and really get this project rolling!

Dont worry Jake , I,m sure theres a lot of people following this thread like me and look forward to seeing the end result . I like the way you,ve come up with the bearing puller , you get a lot of satisfaction when you come up with a scheme that works and is cheap to boot.

Cheers

C3

I think that you better watch out for Dad trying to repo his bike when you're done. Keep up the good work. It's so cool that you will get to keep that bike in the family. I wish that I would have thought of that bearing puller washer when I stripped my frame. Those litte buggers where tough.

Ditto on the ground down washer/bearing knocker outer thingy.
Damned good idear!

3 times on the washer bearing knocker outer dealio.that is such a fresh idea,it is like cold water on my head good idea!thats thinkin on your feet.
you gotta keep postin we need more z1r stuff on this sight.

leon