All right guys, I've been hanging around the forum for a year now asking ridiculous questions and learning how to work on these bikes, and I finally have some progress to show for it.
I bought the bike with about 9000 miles for 400 bucks. It began its life with me looking like this:
Pretty good deal, right? anyway, the carbs were totally screwed but luckily I had another set I had just rebuilt and which were tuned for pods, which I was determined to make work. I later found out with my rebuilt carbs that a PO had installed a stage III kit, which I suspect is the reason why I haven't had trouble with pods yet on the CV carbs. After popping on my rebuilt carbs and some new tires, as well as tensioning the cam chains, I was good to go. I rode the bike as you see it for about 2 months before it became too bitterly cold to take the bike out. I'm based in Providence, where I'm a student. The fact that I'm a student was a bit of a problem, because I didn't really have a great place to store the bike for the winter. My friend also has a CB750 and we ride/work on our bikes together, so we decided to store the bikes behind his house for the winter. We would have put them in a basement or a garage but we didn't have a garage and the bikes wouldn't have fit through available basement openings by a longshot.
We built this enclosure out of a cheap used tent and tarps:
we made walls from tarps. Here's a (dark) panorama of the interior:
This tent was where all work on the bikes was conducted this winter. We had a small space heater in there but even as such we were working mostly in freezing temperatures.
At the time of this post, my bike now looks like this:
because of my limited workspace and resources, as well as my current tastes, I went with a pretty conservative look.
New parts and work I did:
-forks >>> new seals, oil, redone with progressive springs, covered with fork gaiters
-New rear shocks
-gauge needles straightened so now i can actually tell how fast I'm going
-New dent-free gas tank, $80 on ebay, polished and finished with boeshield T-9
-Exhaust blasted and painted. The chrome looks good in the first photo, but it was rusting badly in person. There was also a rot hole that I welded a plate over.
-Installed aluminum exhaust flanges from an F model- required milling to fit. Old ones were rusted.
-All electrical connections cleaned and coated with dielectric grease
-Starter clutch>>> new springs, and bolts loctited. No more marbles in a can.
-A handful of worn parts blasted and re-painted
-Fixed a ridiculous brake squeal with new pads and anti-squeal compound
-Boiled and cleaned brake calipers and piston, fluid replaced
-New AGM battery
-Charging rotor rewound--- old one died at the end of the season
-New rectifier/regulator--- old one went bad as well
-New indicators
-countless new nuts, bolts, washers
1979 CB750K
Locked
