I found a pair that were in gorgeous shape. Complete forks for $35 bucks not including shipping. The chrome is perfect. They just need to be wiped down and cleaned. They even still had a label on them that reads: 1976, 1977, 1978 Honda CB550 Forks. This will be a project that I’ll work on in the next few months, but not anytime soon. I’m going to polish the lowers and sell them, take the dust covers and forks for my bike and then sell my crusty forks.

My CB550′s breaker points need to be adjusted before summer riding. I started this morning but didn’t get to finish due to lunch and a light drizzle outside. What I did discover was a small typo in the Clymer Repair Manual. The point gap is indicated as .016 inches which translates to .4mm, but evidently this basic math has eluded Clymer’s copy editors. Hopefully their 21st edition will reflect an accurate metric conversion. I tried to find a contact email address for the publishers to let them know, but my google-fu skills must be lacking this morning. I can’t seem to find one.

More on this tomorrow.

The cold and the rain are behind us now and it’s time to run some basic maintenance on CB to prepare it for summer riding. I started this morning with a simple vale adjustment.

Popped the tappet covers off.

I slid the feeler gauge between all the valves to measure the gap and they were all fine. If they were off it was by a hundredth of a millimeter. No fun.

I decided to adjust them anyway for good measure and because it was such a nice morning to be outside wrenching on the ol’ bike.

Intake valves (rear) are .05mm gaps. Exhaust valves (front) are .08mm gaps.

All done.

I’ve also been keeping track of my sales and purchases. In fact I have a pretty geeky spreadsheet that covers all my expenses and profits from this caferacer project.

This table illustrates only the items that I stripped from the bike.

Not bad for 30 year old parts. I netted nearly $300 dollars. That profit helped pay for my brand spanking new exhaust.

I haven’t come out ahead, nor have I broken even, but the profits from my eBay auctions have cut my costs on this project significantly.

I honestly didn’t realize this thing was plastic. Even when I was removing the front fender and was in close contact with it I thought it was made of metal. Its in decent shape, someone on eBay will buy it.

I think it looks better without it. I’ll worry about polishing those forks later.

I also have a shiny new Honda OEM brake line waiting to be installed. Maybe I’ll get to it next week.

Here is the link to the post of the removal.
http://www.austincaferacer.com/2008/07/removing-the-battery-and-battery-box/#comment-17

The old thing was pretty distressed, but after some sanding with 320 grit sandpaper and a few coats of some rattle can enamel it was looking fairly decent.

Here is a shot of my clever use of the abundance of bamboo in the yard.

Before shot.

After shot.

The battery back in place. Lets test it out!

Honda 1976 CB550 from Austin CafeRacer on Vimeo.

Sounds good. Idles fine. I won’t know for sure if its fully functional until I get it on the road. Can’t wait for my seat.

I presume the bolt was stripped and the previous owner used a cutting disc or angle grinder to fashion some sort of primitive rectangular knob to be able to turn it and get it out. What I can’t understand is why the bolt was put back in. A new bolt can easily be purchased for around $10 bucks.

I used some vice grips to try turn the bolt… after a short battle, I was the victor. It came loose and I drained the thick, dirty, black oil.

• I wiped down the oil filter housing
• Installed a new oil filter
• New rubber gasket
• New shiny oil filter bolt
• Poured in a few quarts of fresh SAE 10W-40

All my hunting through forums for a step by step instruction set for rejetting carbs was fruitless.

Here is my photo set that hopefully will help others feel less timid when it comes to opening these guys up. Granted, I didn’t fully disassemble them, I only replaced the main jets.

Removing the leaf spring is as easy as moving it to the right and sliding it out from the main jet.

Keeping everything together.

Since I was in here I thought I may as well check the slow jets to see if they were dirty or clogged.

They were fine. I blew some canned air through them and inspected them thoroughly.

Shiny new main jets. Installing them is as simple as pushing them in.

That’s it. I checked all the slow jets (all clean) and pushed in the new 115 main jets, and placed the leaf springs back on.

….but

When I was putting the float bowls back on I noticed that three screws on two carbs weren’t screwing in correctly. The screw holes on the two carbs were stripped.

I was a little sad.

If the screws had been stripped I could have easily replaced them, but it was the screw holes on the carbs that were stripped. Bummer.

Luckily, I live fairly close to an Ace Hardware. A quick trip, and ten minutes later, I came back home with some sweet looking allen bolts.

That solved my problem, except this method only worked on the outside carbs on the outside corners. I just lucked out that those were the holes that were stripped.

I have to say that I kinda enjoy running into these small little problems. It makes the whole experience that much more fun.

I didn’t think there would be a significant weight reduction but there is. The rear fender weights a heck of a lot.