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Re: Harley Sprint (no ST)
- Subject: Re: Harley Sprint (no ST)
- From: Eric Sheley <eric@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1999 12:14:33 -0400
At 05:55 PM 09/07/1999 -0700, Paul Steinbacher wrote:
>>
>> http://www.elscom.com/hdsprint/index.htm
>>
>Nice job Eric. Did you do most of the work yourself?
Yes
I never realized (or imagined) how much work was involved. I've talked to a
few others that have done restorations "themselves" and was amazed to find
out how much they actually sent out for others to do.
I wanted to do as much as possible myself (both out of pride and limited
finances).
Stuff I had done by others:
Paint (and some of the body work)
Chroming
Truing and balancing of the tires.
Seat recovering.
I did everything else. Luckily for me the pervious owner had the original
factory service manual which was a big help and I found a guy in California
that restores them for a living - he was a life saver several times.
The bike was in pretty rough shape, but I was lucky that the frame was not
bent and it still had the original rims in a fairly undamaged condition.
My first priority was stripping the bike so it could be repainted. Going
through some old info, I found that the 72 came in 3 colors - Red, Drab
Green and Yellow. Of course mine was blue, so I knew that wasn't right.
Pulling one of the reflectors from the rear of the bike, I found the yellow
underneath. So using that section, the same guy that painted my Triumph
matched and reshot the body parts to the factory color (after fixing the
dents in the tank). Once again, he did a great job.
At them same time, I started with the wheels. The stock spokes were
seriously corroded with about 15% missing or broken. Most of the nipples
were rusted and I ended up having to remove a lot of them with the Dremel.
I blasted the wheels and took them to a local harley shop where my friend
is head mechanic. He examined them and found that they were in very good
condition structurally (other that the surface corrosion). Stock rims for
this bike are not all that common and accordingly fetch an extremely high
price on the market. The fact that these were good (and had the stock
factory stamp visible) was great news. Then to find the spokes. It took
calls to 15 parts dealers to finally come up with a full NOS set for front
and rear. The original plan was to polish them, but after getting them, I
decided against it and instead had them chromed along with the rims. The
rims were hand polished so as to maintain the original factory stamps, so
this added to the quickly climbing price tag.
I was going to re-chrome the bars at the same time, but found that they
were slightly bent. On closed examination I found a hairline fracture
underneath where the bars had obviously re bent after hitting a stationary
object. After a month of unsuccessful searching, I was about to throw my
hands up in disgust when I happened upon a dealer out west that was
getting rid of some aermacchi parts. He found the 72 bars, but after I
commented on how hard they were to find (oops) he decided to keep them
:-( But he did notice that the 72 bar and 73 bars were identical other
than a set of signal mounts that were welded to the side of the 73 bars.
Wahoo! I got the 73's and ground off the signal posts and cleaned up the
sloppy stock welds at the same time. Added that to the group and dropped
everything off at Space Coast plating.
Now with the time consuming stuff out of the way (or so I thought) I began
working on the motor. The bike had been stored in less than desirable
locations and because of it, all the fasteners holding the cases and
covers were in some way deteriorated or corroded. Both the right and left
covers were held on by stripped allen head bolts. I ground down an allen
key (adding a slight taper) and using a hammer drove it firmly into each
socket. Then using a wrench I was able to extract each of the bolts.
Wow - that email got away from me. If anyone is remotely interested at this
point let me know and I will continue the story......
- - Eric
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