D
Daffid
Guest
Hey hey hey!
Where to begin?... Oh yeah!
HELLO BASSCLIFF!! Sir, I know other's have said it and I'm just an echo, but you rock. Not to take the wind out of your sails for your normal welcome, but I've read over a ton of what you've had to say, and picked around a good chunck of your website. Can I just drop a big THANK YOU!!! in here right from the get go? Same goes for GoodTimes and GateKeeper. You three have been the inspiration for the madness that I'm now embarking on (and I'm glad for this!!)
So, to kick this off, I will introduce myself a tiny bit. I'm Timm, I live a little outside St. Louis, MO, and like to ride (anyone feel like an AA meeting is kicking off? lol..). I also love to tinker, take things apart, and generally fix my own crap cause A) I'm usually broke or B) to stubborn to take it to someone else and spend my money when I actually have the money to do so. Actually, I get great satisfaction out of being able to use something that I've built/repaired/etc. which is why I've got an '82 850 instead of an '02 SV650.
So I bought this little gem from a mechanic. I've learned a lesson here, but I'll start with a question: Can anyone tell me why the conventional wisdom is that a mechanic's stuff is better to own? My own experience is that a mechanic's stuff is just dressed up a little nicer to hide the flaws (no offense to anyone to wrenches for a living - just found a bad apple in the bunch perhaps). I didn't know a lot of the history of the bike when I bought it, only that he had had it apart and something about piston rings and gaskets. Ok, cool, so I should be able to scratch that off the list of potential problems! Maaaaybe not...
I get it home, ride it around for a couple of weeks and rather quickly realize that the engine is making an increasingly loud slapping (metal on metal) noise. My mechanic tells me later that this is the cam chain, that its too loose and the tensioner is already maxed out. Greaaaat. He also went ahead while he was rooting around and did a compression test. 121, 78, 90 something, and 130 were the resulting numbers if I recall correctly. So being extremely broke at the time I think him for his time, pay him what I owe, and promptly store my broken toy in the basement for 4 years. In the mean time I've been bumming rides from anyone with a bike that was willing to let me sit on it, and generally ignoring the empty hole in my pocket book that was prohibiting me from fixing my GS. Then....
I did a little bit of horse trading, bartering, wheedling and wound up with $450 in my pocket. Bought a very ratty old '86 Mazda pickup. I LOVE these old trucks. They are wicked durable. So I fixed it up little by little over the course of a couple of years as I drove it to work, until my financial state improved enough this spring to buy a newer truck. Sold the old Mazda for $1100, and suddenly found myself in possession of GS REBUILD MONEY! I swear, I think I heard a church choir give me a hallelujah. So I put some time into my garage to get some electrical outlets working and enough lighting wired in to make the local authorities wonder if I was growning funny stuff, put the motorcycle stand together and stuck my poor broken toy on top of it. For you picture junkies, here's where we started, more or less:
Nope, those garage windows aren't blacked out, it was 11:30 at night.
Ok, I may have gone a tiny bit overboard with the lights...
So over the last several days I've been tearing into the bike, pulling things off so that I can pull the motor, clean rust off things, etc. I have read enough to know that I might as well do all the ugly at once. I'm also just a shade OCD (anal, obsessive...whatever you want to call it) about things, so I knew if I didn't do it the first time I wouldn't be happy until I did (not to mention something might not work right). I knew I was going to run into some happy little surprises. Here's one of them:
and another:
This looks right...Right??
One more to grow on:
This was wrapped in a foot of (exceedingly grimy) electrical tape... No idea what it went to originally.
Two weeks ago, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. Now, I still don't know what I'm doing, but I have a lot of grease on my hands, and my girlfriend giggles at me when she hears me cussin in the garage. I've always wanted to know the intricacies of how a motor works, and what the little black boxes all do. That's really more why I'm doing this than anything. Yes, riding around and spending 1/3 of the $$ a month in gas will be great. Yep, I'm really going to enjoy the sense of satisfaction of showing it off to people. But I'm enjoying the heck out of learning what makes this poor beat up beast tick. I'm sure along the way I'll have a number of (less than?) poignant questions. I just hope you all get as much of a kick out of watching me as I'll get out of doing this.
**Edit** I redid the pics... Seems someone had trouble seeing things...
Actually, I was doing this about 1am, and didn't notice I was using the image source location for the thumbnail on Flikr, instead of the actual image size! Whoops...
Where to begin?... Oh yeah!
HELLO BASSCLIFF!! Sir, I know other's have said it and I'm just an echo, but you rock. Not to take the wind out of your sails for your normal welcome, but I've read over a ton of what you've had to say, and picked around a good chunck of your website. Can I just drop a big THANK YOU!!! in here right from the get go? Same goes for GoodTimes and GateKeeper. You three have been the inspiration for the madness that I'm now embarking on (and I'm glad for this!!)
So, to kick this off, I will introduce myself a tiny bit. I'm Timm, I live a little outside St. Louis, MO, and like to ride (anyone feel like an AA meeting is kicking off? lol..). I also love to tinker, take things apart, and generally fix my own crap cause A) I'm usually broke or B) to stubborn to take it to someone else and spend my money when I actually have the money to do so. Actually, I get great satisfaction out of being able to use something that I've built/repaired/etc. which is why I've got an '82 850 instead of an '02 SV650.
So I bought this little gem from a mechanic. I've learned a lesson here, but I'll start with a question: Can anyone tell me why the conventional wisdom is that a mechanic's stuff is better to own? My own experience is that a mechanic's stuff is just dressed up a little nicer to hide the flaws (no offense to anyone to wrenches for a living - just found a bad apple in the bunch perhaps). I didn't know a lot of the history of the bike when I bought it, only that he had had it apart and something about piston rings and gaskets. Ok, cool, so I should be able to scratch that off the list of potential problems! Maaaaybe not...
I get it home, ride it around for a couple of weeks and rather quickly realize that the engine is making an increasingly loud slapping (metal on metal) noise. My mechanic tells me later that this is the cam chain, that its too loose and the tensioner is already maxed out. Greaaaat. He also went ahead while he was rooting around and did a compression test. 121, 78, 90 something, and 130 were the resulting numbers if I recall correctly. So being extremely broke at the time I think him for his time, pay him what I owe, and promptly store my broken toy in the basement for 4 years. In the mean time I've been bumming rides from anyone with a bike that was willing to let me sit on it, and generally ignoring the empty hole in my pocket book that was prohibiting me from fixing my GS. Then....
I did a little bit of horse trading, bartering, wheedling and wound up with $450 in my pocket. Bought a very ratty old '86 Mazda pickup. I LOVE these old trucks. They are wicked durable. So I fixed it up little by little over the course of a couple of years as I drove it to work, until my financial state improved enough this spring to buy a newer truck. Sold the old Mazda for $1100, and suddenly found myself in possession of GS REBUILD MONEY! I swear, I think I heard a church choir give me a hallelujah. So I put some time into my garage to get some electrical outlets working and enough lighting wired in to make the local authorities wonder if I was growning funny stuff, put the motorcycle stand together and stuck my poor broken toy on top of it. For you picture junkies, here's where we started, more or less:
Nope, those garage windows aren't blacked out, it was 11:30 at night.
Ok, I may have gone a tiny bit overboard with the lights...
So over the last several days I've been tearing into the bike, pulling things off so that I can pull the motor, clean rust off things, etc. I have read enough to know that I might as well do all the ugly at once. I'm also just a shade OCD (anal, obsessive...whatever you want to call it) about things, so I knew if I didn't do it the first time I wouldn't be happy until I did (not to mention something might not work right). I knew I was going to run into some happy little surprises. Here's one of them:
and another:
This looks right...Right??
One more to grow on:
This was wrapped in a foot of (exceedingly grimy) electrical tape... No idea what it went to originally.
Two weeks ago, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. Now, I still don't know what I'm doing, but I have a lot of grease on my hands, and my girlfriend giggles at me when she hears me cussin in the garage. I've always wanted to know the intricacies of how a motor works, and what the little black boxes all do. That's really more why I'm doing this than anything. Yes, riding around and spending 1/3 of the $$ a month in gas will be great. Yep, I'm really going to enjoy the sense of satisfaction of showing it off to people. But I'm enjoying the heck out of learning what makes this poor beat up beast tick. I'm sure along the way I'll have a number of (less than?) poignant questions. I just hope you all get as much of a kick out of watching me as I'll get out of doing this.
**Edit** I redid the pics... Seems someone had trouble seeing things...
Actually, I was doing this about 1am, and didn't notice I was using the image source location for the thumbnail on Flikr, instead of the actual image size! Whoops...
Last edited:
