Category Archives: RD project

wiring

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I am not a fan of wiring. I greatly enjoy soldering, I like electrical tape, and have a little fascination with multi-meters, but I am missing one essential ingredient that is necessary to work with wiring issues: Patience.

I lack patience. I get frustrated and tunnel vision sets in. I lose the ability to logic out problems and my thought processes go fuzzy.

Hm.

Perhaps one of these days I’ll cultivate some way to quiet my head and focus on the wires and the flow of electricity moving through them. It’s either that, or I will have to install pedals on my spikey bike and duct tape a Maglite to the forks.

Putting Spiky Bike back together

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Real progress! Yay!

Today three friends came over and helped me do a bunch of stuff to my RD.

We got the frame stabilized and whew, that was tough. Time for a break and some homemade beer!

Ah, that’s better. Now to install the motor!

I’m sure there’s a joke here… “how many guys does it take to install an engine into an RD350?”

Ba-dum-cha!

Success was ours!

I’m probably going to need a new kickstarter at some point. This one has cracks.

We got the swingarm and rear wheel on – and for some reason I have no photos of that.

Next we tackled the wiring harness. What a tangled mess we weave…. Oh, wait, that’s something else. We got the harness set up pretty good, but ended up losing our light before we got to really get into troubleshooting it. So, more work on that soon.

I’m not sure what Dino is doing to my bike here, but I’m sure it’s something naughty.

Okay, so I do know what he was doing with his arm up to the elbow in my bike. He was hiding some electrical bits under the tank!

from a different angle:

More hidden electrical bits:

With a little help from my friends

I’ll be tearing around on my RD around soon!

Progress!

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Progress!

With the excellent help from my friend Pete, we got the pesky things apart.

The fork seals proved to be a bit of a pain, and ended up needing basicially a crowbar to pry them out. Finally, pop! out they came.

A fantastic thing to do when taking things apart is take photos of them so you know how to put them back together.

Threw everything into the parts washer for a cleanin’

All clean!

Now, to paint the lowers and put it all back together.
Hopefully, I’ll paint them today (maybe tomorrow) and then put the forks back together in a few days. Yay!