Reassembling these two ended up being a little fiddly and taking a while, particularly the front forks. It turns out that there is an idiosyncrasy of the R65 which is that the fork tubes are very difficult to slide into the upper triple clamp… but more on that later.
Starting with the swingarm- new brake shoes were fitted and the splines of the final drive were coated with moly paste. I then lifted the swingarm into position and supported the final drive on a bucket. The idea with the pivot pins is to make sure the swingarm is centred in the frame. This takes some trial and error tightening and loosening on each side until it’s even. I used a digital caliper to help get this right. It doesn’t have to be sub-millimetre perfect. When you’ve got it right you can grease everything up using a grease gun with appropriate nozzle and then do a preload torque to 12nm. Then back off the nuts and retorque to spec, making sure everything has stayed centred. Then the big retaining nuts can be put on and tightened to spec. This takes a while to get right.
The problem with the fork tubes was one of the more difficult problems of the build. This should have been easy but I was unable to get the fork tubes up into the top triple clamp. No amount of “wood wedges”, “big screw drivers” or “heating it up” made any difference. (These were all helpful suggestions from various folk). Eventually on an R65 forum I discovered that this was a somewhat unique problem for the R65 due to its thick alloy triple clamp. I was then directed to a document describing how to make a clever little spreader device which can be inserted into the pinch bolt hole and actually spread the clamp a little wider allowing the tube to slide in. I have tried to find who made this document to credit them. If anyone knows please let me know.
Eventually the fork tubes were in place and torqued to spec. Then my new handlebars (Lucas Supersports) were added a few mockup photos with the tank in place were taken whilst a beer was consumed.
