Half a motorcycle, still/again

Lemontree did a whole bunch of work on her bike today and yesterday. She recovered the seat and painted the frame, and then together we reinstalled the swingarm, rear wheel, fender, shocks, chain guard, exhaust, and passenger footpegs.

As you can see, the exhaust is now black. The chrome was too far gone to save, so Lemontree used header paint (1,800°F) to make it black. I think it looks good.

That accomplished, we removed the front wheel and dug in for a fight! The two front forks were seriously rusted in place and it took a sledgehammer -- quite literally, a 2.5lb sledge -- to beat them off. Tip to anyone removing rusted fork stanchion tubes on a CL100, get a M10x1.25 threaded rod a couple of feet long, thread it into the top of the tube, and proceed to whale on it.

So the reason we took the fork apart was a ripped gaiter -- that's the rubber accordion that keeps dirt out of the shock absorber part of the fork -- and leaky fork fluid seal. Sadly, the reason the fork seal leaked was because the fork at some point had been chewed up by rocks etc that were allowed in by the ripped gaiter. Now replacing the seal is useless because the rough fork tube will immediately tear it up. :( So... we will have to either replace the fork tubes or weld up and re-machine the damaged sections. It'll be a few more weeks at least. :(

But, the parts that are done look really good!