I removed my post Bent Trigger, if ya read it, as sounded a bit stupid on my part. It's a dayy of stupid for 'me' lol.
& yes he does a great job does Tinkicker.

Just the pic.  I never saw any evidence the stem was bent.  Knowing it had been in an accident. I did place it on a surface plate at work to check that the yokes were not twisted, which is very common after a front ender.

I agree. That method of adjustment is absolute, production cost cutting rubbish.  Not a patch on other designs.

Another pic.  Being in an accident, I did check it at work on a surface plate for twisting.
I bruised the damn lower track with my driving tube, luckily it missed the working area by a milimeter.  I was expecting the track to be fully hardened.  It wasnt and was a very tight SoB.
My bad though.  Should have taken it to work and put it on the bearing heater.  It would have dropped straight on.
I was very miffed with myself.



 

Sounds like it was tight fit--which it should be--but i've seen them loose there too.
Damage looks out of the bearing track, just. I cheated & wound the pic up big for a look.
I'm sure ya 'onto it' but 19x1/4 bottom & 22x3/16 top.

Took both fork legs to work just in case he had rounded off the damper rod bolts and it is easier to undo them with an air gun if he had managed not to.

I need not have worried.  Removing the drain plugs and pumping the forks produced about an egg cup full of indeterminate brown sludge that was once 1970s fork oil.  He had not had the legs apart, nor even changed the oil.

Pulling them apart revealed 40 years of condensation inside the fork gaitors had been pooling around the top of the seals.
The fork tubes were bolloxed, the chrome had lifted away right on the seal wiping area  as well as around the fork yokes.


A quick check revealed that the original 31mm tubes were unavailabe, as were aftermarket ones at that time*

Nothing for it but to have them ground and hard chromed.  Since my VFR legs were £150 per leg, I was going to have to save my pennies. 
At least I can comfort myself that ground hard chrome is consideraby thicker and orders of magnitude more durable than the microns thick factory chrome that is mainly for light corrosion prevention and cosmetic purposes.
I have seen 60 year old hydraulic cylinders that have been left in the weather permanently and the chrome is still good.

* Of course, once I had the legs done, aftermarket ones became available soon after.  That is the way my luck runs.

Fully overhauled and rebuilt fork legs these days means a quick polish up with metal polish apparently.


​​​​While saving my pennies for the forks, I will be fully occupied with making a UK left hand handlebar switch mate up with a US wiring harness and US/ Europe spec ignition switch and sort out the UK spec tailight feed and charging system without destroying the integrity of the US loom and all with the correct colours and connectors.
I will have to make another piggyback harness connected inside the headlamp shell to carry the wiring back to where it is needed.
I wish I could have found a good UK wiring loom but you can only work with the pot you have got to piss in.

I should have made up a new UK spec loom entirely but I was not reckoning on such huge differences between the US and UK looms.

The piggyback harness and US harness can be seen coming from the back from the headlamp in this pic of the bike.

Turned my attention to the handlebars.
They were original. Yay!
They were badly pitted on the outside and powder coated over the top. Boo.
They were bent slightly back and up on the left side. Boo.

If they were badly pitted on the outside, what was the corrosion like on the inside?

Scrap is all they are worth.  

The clock bracket looked good. Result!

Bit of wiring completed, bars fitted, battery fitted and we come to one of the great milestones in any rebuild.
Ignition on and it is off the ventilator and breathing for itself.

First signs of life.

More twiddling with wires, fitting more parts, generally cursing the old git for putting me through this; and trying hard not to break into repeated bouts of sobbing, I got the piggyback harness completed with the very minimum disturbance to the US loom.  Of course, alterations had to be made to the loom to suit the new switches, but nothing was made to the original connections and wires that could not be swapped back to standard configuration.

The ball of wires was getting worryingly large though as I now had two looms and various additional adapter cables to fit inside the headlamp shell.

What was once quite roomy was looking like it was going to be a very tight fit.  

Still.  Ignition on and we have indicators, brake lights and a tail light that now responds to the UK spec left handlebar switch.




I was itching to try the instrument lights, but with the engine not yet ready to start, I had to wait.  Then my tired and emotional mind had a brainwave an hour or two later...
Make a temparary shunt lead from the battery to the white wire to emulate the lighting coil output.

We have main and dip beam power to the new bulb holder, instrument lights and main beam warning light.  I discovered that the horn was knackered and needed replacing.  It gave out a pathetic meow like a geriatric cat, instead of a startling honk like a goose during mating season.

It has not seen so many lights lit for 43 years.

Time to try cram the wires and the new headlamp unit into the same bowl and get the engine ready to kick over.
​​​​​

I'm surprised not to see that the motor industry professional did not use any house wire style wire nuts on the loom! I have seen those used on multiple occasions in the headlight bucket.

He probably thought about it , but found the cost prohibitive. Better to twist em together and cover them in green or black insulation tape.

Sometimes you feel like you could just go round and throttle some tw*t don't you?
My CT3 was bad but not that bad.

Yes. I had gratifying thoughts of committing grievous bodily harm on the old scrote many the time.
By this time I was seriously thinking of taking him to the small claims court for his gross misrepresentation in his advertisement.  For sure, if he had honestly said it was cosmetically restored only, I would not have touched it with a bargepole.

As a motor industry professional, as am I, we are held to a greater degree of accountability than Joe Public.
Joe Public may not realise his workmanship was very poor, and his advert deliberately misleading; however a professional certainly would in the eyes of the court and I guess I would be awarded my material costs to date.

Having thought about it, I think it is obvious that he did not teach mechanical or electrical engineering at college.
I think he taught car body repair and spray painting.
That side of the bike was pretty good.

Good enough to fool a fool......

Time came to start the engine. I filled the carb up with a syringe of premix and kicked.
And kicked.
And kicked.

Nuthin.

Time to check for spark. No spark.

Damn was that new CDI a bad one, that had been replaced under warranty by an unknown shop in the good old USofA, back in the mists of time, and somehow found itself back on the shelf? I dunno.

Went through all the wiring again and everything checked out. Looked at the original tin covered plug cap.... Back in the day when I bought a DT175mx brand new, that plug cap got thrown in the bin on the first day.  They were renowned for causing misfires.

Pulled off the cap rigged a screwdriver to ground out and placed the bare lead about 6mm from the screwdriver.

We have a spark! Yay.

RF shielded cap was a duff un. NGK resistor cap ordered.


I "confiscated" the plug cap off the house standby generator and fitted that. Plug back in, tightened up and kick.
Did it fire?  Sounded like it had a couple of tries.

With impecable timing that only a woman possesses, the missus opened the conservatory door and announced that my Saturday lunch was going to go cold.

Ignition off and climbed off the bike to follow the missus to the kitchen. As I climbed off I spied something to gladden the heart and snapped a quick pic...