The first phase of the project was the tear down. I’d never done this before but it didn’t take too long. After about a weekend most of the bike was in pieces. I tried to take a lot of pictures and label things as I went. Where ever possible I put nuts and bolts back into their holes so I would know where they came from later. The parts that I couldn’t put straight back in went into ziploc bags with labels on them. I can’t stress enough how valuable anything you do to keep organised will be later on. Some picture you took of nothing in particular now might just show you a critical detail you can’t work out later.
I started by removing the fuel tank. Make sure you shut off the fuel petcock before doing this or you’ll have fuel everywhere. Airhead tanks are secured at the back in a couple of possible ways. Some have nuts securing the back of the tank to the frame, but most, including the R65 have a kind of rubber band. At the front they just have a groove that engages a horizontal part of the frame. I discovered that my bike had no securing at the back and was only held on by our friend gravity. Oh well.
Underneath the tank reside the various electrical components. As I was taking these apart I tried to take a lot of photographs to help me work out how to put it back together later. Noticing a theme?? The following photographs show the general filth that was uncovered during the tear down and also show some examples of my attempts at labelling cables and wires.
Some specific issues that I encountered during tear down which i think bear special mention are as follows;
Final drive nuts
These are the four 10mm nuts that join the output flange of the gearbox to the drive shaft. You have to remove them to remove the rear swingarm. They are underneath the rubber boot. The issue I had with these nuts is that there is very tight clearance around them and none of the spanners I had would fit. I was able to source a “thin walled” 10mm ring spanner which worked.
Exhaust nuts
Removal of the exhausts pipes out of the heads requires a special tool as shown. Some people advocated grinding or cutting the nuts and then replacing them at rebuild. I’m going to try and clean mine up and I plan on doing other bikes later so I bought the tool.
Steering head hex bolt
This thing was incredibly tight. Apparently a problem relating to the mixing of alloy and steel parts causing binding. I seriously thought I was doing something wrong as I used progressively bigger breaker bars. Was it reverse threaded? Had someone loc-tited it?? I finally got it off using a 2 foot breaker bar. It made an almighty pop. (Ed- I subsequently bought a Ryobi cordless rattle gun/impact wrench when doing my fork work. This had proved a very useful tool and I wish I had had it when trying to losen this nut)
Engine removal from frame
I had been worried about this being essentially a one man show. In the end it wasn’t a big deal. I removed the gearbox and the heads and barrels (taking care not to let the pistons slam against the alloy block). Then I used a trolley jack to support the engine while I withdrew the mounting bolts. I’m not a big guy, but it was pretty easy to lift the engine out an onto a workbench. I’d say it weighted about 30kg. This was with the oil emptied of course.
And that’s about a wrap for tear down. Remember to keep things organised, labelled and photographed! Next entry will be about cleaning and painting!
