Main stand after painting

Here it is with the weld to reinforce top tube and lower curved sections. Sorry it's so horrible - it was difficult to get  a clean run because of the rust still in there. Oh well.

Sorting out the main stand

The lower parts of the main stand are curved to allow the big Trophy 1200 to be rocked up neatly into place. The idea is that, with a smooth pull and plenty of body weight pivoting through my right foot on the stand's little welded pad, up she comes. The result is that the bike's weight bears on the powder coated finish of the stand. This inevitably causes it to wear through to the metal beneath. It's the same story at the top of the stand where its top bracing tube hits a pair of stops. The metal work in both places was worn thin, but this was especially true on the lower section.

The main stand has a tough powder coated finish. Unfortunately, beyond the curved section at the bottom and the top tube, it was quite a bit tougher than the metal work beneath it so corrosion had started to creep up and down. So I decided to strip the coating off and then reinforce the damaged sections with weld.

It proved to be pretty challenging work with a pair of chisels and imminent danger of skewering myself. Thick gloves proved their worth several times over.  

Stripped of its 'snake skin' coating ...

...the metal in the middle was pristine.

In a bath of rust removing stuff
(the bottle says phosphoric acid) 

I'm afraid my camera battery went dead just after I got set up to do the welding but this was just before I started grinding the top tube to shiny metal for rebuilding its thickness. It's not to hide the site of the horrible result, honest ;-)

Greasy fun with Daytona suspension linkages

 A nice little job to get done, and satisfying to see fresh grease squeezing out of the seals. 

Mini Me Joe Bar Daytona 900

Sir B saw this and thought of me. Wonder why ... ?

What a jolly little chap he is. Just like me, except my hooter is not quite that Gallic and I lack his follicular grandure.

Alors, c'est pas mal du toute. Ca roule ou quoi. Vive, les motards! Vive, la route!

Trophy 1200 rear mudguard

The rear mudguard is a large injection moulded highly flexible plastic component. So it can put up with a lot of road rubbish without any trouble at all. It is mounted to the frame by rubber grommets and six steel M6 machine screws running through shouldered sleeves. It is also pop-rivetted to two mild steel brackets that clamp a rubber gator to the swing arm, the lower bracket being attached to the swinging arm with two M8 bolts. 

Releasing two M8 bolts that clamp a rubber gator at the forward
end of the swinging arm

The rivets for the gator were very rusty and the aluminium rivets severely corroded so I drilled them out.

Rubber gator and its mounting brackets
after drilling out the rivets

Drilling out the rivets

Coolant header tank showing sheared
pop rivets and mounting plate

The mudguard is also pop-rivetted to a bracket for the coolant header tank. These rivets had failed, the tank loose on the mudguard. The coolant header tank is held on to the bracket by two long torx headed M6 bolts. These had to be soaked in WD40 for a week before I could ease them out. I couldn't use heat or force for fear of damaging the plastic tank.

Refurbished shouldered sleeves

I refurbished the shouldered sleeves with a wire brush on a drill and then leaving them in a bath of phosphoric acid over night. Then it was a coat of anti-rust primer (I use P45 zinc paint) and a hard top coat (Smoothrite gold in this case as an approximation to the cadmium finish of the originals ... and because I got a big tin of it at a knock-down price). The plastic moulding cleaned up beautifully. There were no problems with rivets that retain the stone shields for the air intakes or the ECU bracket.

The final thing was to sort of the gator brackets. These were so severely rusted (I estimate they'd lost half their thickness) that I decided to make my own replacements from aluminium plate.

I painted them with Hammerite special metals primer and some stuff suitable for galvanized metals.

Riveting the gator to the rear
mudguard with three M4
9.5mm aluminium rivets

Mudguard and gator reassembled

The whole thing pop-riveted back together pretty well though it was a cumbersome thing to juggle the gator, clamp, main moulding, riveting gun and a washer behind it. The result is very pleasing to me.

Trial fixing of additional mud flap to
swinging arm.

Additional mud flap with stainless M8
fixings, new clamp bracket and replacement
lower gator clamp bracket

I added an additional mudflap to protect the lower part of the rear shock and the suspension linkage from road muck from the back wheel.

Voltmeter and temperature guage

A separate project: to adapt a car voltmeter to fit on my Daytona 900. Here's the dash before I started, showing a black lower trim beneath the strip of warning lights:

Pic 1: The dash before adding the voltmeter

Pic 3: Live supply from brown
horn connection

Pic 2: The car voltmeter (top) and two wires
ready for tinning

The voltmeter was an ebay purchase and also has a thermometer function. It is designed to be used inside a car plugged into the cigarette lighter. That made the wiring simple: just chop of the plug, strip the postive and negative wires, tin with solder and the crimp on a couple of connectors. The downside is lack of weather proofing.

I used 'red' spade connectors and heat shrink tube to insulate. The extra two relays visible in the picture are for the air horn compressor and auxiliary/daytime lights I'd fitted. I took power from the redundant horn terminals (brown) because it is live with the main ignition switch in the on position. I had to add an earth - easy to do. 

I hadn't realised the voltage would have dropped by a volt or two compared to a direct feed from the battery. i could test this because the additional relays are fed directly with an additional loom I'd installed a few years ago. I'll fix that some other time.

Pic 5: illuminate voltmeter

Pic 4: voltmeter in place and powered on

 I made up a new instrument mounting trim from 3mm aluminium plate. I cut a clear plastic sheet to size to keep the worst of the rain off the meter, hence the reflection over its face in picture 4. Pics 5  and 6 show the illumination  - seems to match the clocks pretty well. I think it will cope OK like that but not hose pipes or pressure washers. As long as I remember, I'll be OK.

Pic 6: Showing 16.7 C and 11.3 volts - small red light is a warning that the battery is low

Some nice new stainless steel exhaust studs for my Trophy 1200

Seized (left) and stainless (right)
exhaust studs

The majority of the nuts that clamp the exhaust pipes into the cylinder head were seized on to the studs. This meant that the studs wound out of the head when I tried to undo them. I decide to replace them with stainless studs that I'd make up myself out of M8 threaded rod.

I removed the non-seized studs by locking to M8 nuts against one another and winding the remaining studs out.

Cleaning out threaded stud holes
with an M8 tap

 I then ran an M8 tap into each of the threaded stud holes to make sure the new studs would go in properly. It is always important to be aware of the risk of electrolytic corrosion when using stainless steel with aluminium components. This is because it can attack aluminium more severely than with mild steel.

Installing stainless studs with thread lock

I decided to use a thread locking compound to prevent water ingress and to hold the studs fast in the head. I used the two-nuts method to install them in the head. A made a pretty neat job, though I say so myself ;-)

Stainless steel exhaust headers.
(and perished oil pipes in the foreground)

The exhaust itself was in good condition over all. It is made of stainless steel exhaust pipes with two chromed mild-steel silencers. It had a dented link pipe and snapped support bracket that runs under the sump. The centre exhaust clamp was also ground in half where it had presumably been dragged over a curb at regular intervals. 

The weight of it was *incredible* - like a sack of concrete. Then again, maybe I shouldn't grumble about all the metal it must contain since it has lasted 20 years. 

Sump story

After draining the oil, I knew that I would not get any peace of mind unless I removed the sump to clean out the mesh filters inside. The sealing washer on the sump plug was in a poor state too - corrosion had eaten half-way through its thickness and the amount of oil all around it showed the engine had been losing a fair bit of it. I think mostly from the oil cooler, but that's another story.

So I pulled the bodywork off, fighting with some very poor fasteners in the process, and grappled with the exhaust. It (a) suffered from the nuts that hold the pipes into the cylinder head having seized onto the studs and (b) being unbelievably heavy. 

Original exhaust studs with seized-on nuts (left) with replacement M8 stainless studs (centre/right). 

I decided to make replacement studs from threaded stainless steel rod, along with other replacement fasteners for the bodywork. The latter have a deep shoulder to protect the plastic panels. I replicated these with brass and aluminium tubing cut to length and then used as short sleeves butting up against the screw heads. The exhaust studs were very satisfying to do. But that's another story...

View of the rear wall of the engine case, showing three threaded holes for sump retaining screws. The rear shock absorber is visible behind. The center hole still contains the remains of a sheared screw.  

One of the many machine screws that retain the sump had stuck fast after about ten turns. It was difficult to understand why after turning with little difficulty at the start. However, it was the centre of three at the very back of the sump, and also retains a steadying bracket for the exhaust. It could have been that the heat had hardened a thread locking compound. Whatever the reason, the torx screw head rounded out so I had to cut it off. Curses.

Swarf trapped by two oil strainers in sump.

When I did manage to remove the sump, assisted by judicious use of a rubber mallet to break the gasket seal, I was extremely glad I had. The two mesh screens had caught some impressive looking bits of swarf. Of course, I wasn't at all glad to see swarf this chunky. Where was it from? So it was that I was set on a rather more serious course of inspecting the engine.

Removal of the bodywork showed up the rough state of the cylinder head cover. But that's another story ...

Flaking paint on cylinder head cover
and rusty retaining screws

My Trophy 1200 stripped of
bodywork, exhaust and oil cooler