Johnny´s MC-lackering did it again!

Last day of vacation ended up being the perfect ending for a motorcycle restorer's holiday. Not much done on the bike for the last two weeks, merely a few communications with my friend, Johnny Tarp at Johnny´s MC-lackering in Kristinehamn, to get things correct on the paint job. He finished the job a couple of days ago and today I spent my last day of vacation in the car to pick up our TWO body sets... Mine and Janne´s. It isn´t every day you get to handle 50% of the total amount of H1R bodies ever imported to Sweden through Floeter. Makes you think for a while!

I drove the odd 300 kms to Kristinehamn and met up with Johnny at his shop out in the woods outside town. There they were. The two body sets painted and ready to go back to Stockholm.

Johnny Tarp putting the fairings together for transportation.

 Johnny told me he had spent more than two full days just prepping the two fairings for paint. No one knows if these fairings are the original ones or if they have been changed during the course of racing. I know mine has been sitting in a barn for at least 40 years. But God knows the guys racing these bikes back in the seventies crashed quite a few times and I believe the fairings took a beating every time...

The master painter at work....

 We tried to secure the stability of the fiber glass parts as best we could. I didn´t want anything to happen to them during the way back to Stockholm. Luckily I have quite a big car with a total of seven seats. As can be seen below, Janne´s repainted tank had to travel up front with me. Coffee and a vanilla bun takes the boredom out of driving!

Pleasures during driving....

 Getting home after the three hour drive. Janne is away for a few days so I had to store all the paintwork in my small garage. Really crowded with 2 (!) H1R:s in here! Here we have the two complete body sets finished paint wise. You can tell Johnny did an excellent job! The two main fairings are very different in shape and size. Mine is shorter, probably cut in the rear part at some point in time. That makes my "number plate" almost circular compared to Jannes´s that is (maybe...) more original in shape and thus a more "stretched" version of the number circle. There was no other way to deal with these differences than the way Johnny handled them. I´m extremely happy so far!

Lots of H1R paint...

You can also see the black inside of the fairings. I was a bit worried that wuld come out bad, but I think it looks just great. Since I´m after a slightly used look on my bike I like the slightly rugged texture of the flat black paint. Just perfect! I may have to soften the gloss on the outside of the fairings to make them look ever so lightly used. We´ll see about that later on! I´m also looking for the kind of sponsor decals "Esso" used on his bike. I know he had a "BP" shield on the sides of the fairing and also "Dunlop" stickers plus a "Champion" sticker. I also need to figure out how to deal with the slightly cursive lettering at the rear of my seat saying "Esso Gunnarsson" in a very special design. The hunt is on!

There are quite a few pictures of "Esso´s" bike with a black belly pan. I´m not quite sure when it was changed from green, but I know it was green during the early season of 1970 and that is the time span I´m looking to reproduce with the look of my racer. The picture below shows my belly pan fastened temporarily with plastic screws and nuts. Note the "circular number plate" on mine compared to the more oval one on Janne´s fairing further back on the floor. It´s going to be interesting to see them together again when we both are done...

H1R fairings and engine.

 Space is a commodity that is very scarce in my garage so everything has to be stored as tight as possible in order to fit everything into the small room. Tomorrow is work so it´ll have to sit for a while until I get back and can deliver Janne´s parts to him. Below is a picture of the stuff piled up to make space for my son´s bike when he gets back. Crowded is the word!

Cramped up!

 We used my tank as a "color match" for the complete paint job. I was determined to use mine as it was, just cleaned up and polished. Janne had his tank painted a while ago but changed his mind when he saw the color of mine and decided to repaint his. That way we will hopefully be able to recreate a few of the pictures from the very first races 1970 when these two bikes raced side by side. And they will look the same! Not a small feat to accomplish.

Janne´s tank and my fairing.

 In the picture above is Janne´s tank and my fairing. We had a couple of pictures from a magazine in May1970 where Hartmut Floeter poses with these two bikes outside his business. In those pictures it is evident that my tank has been repainted at some point. The "Kawasaki" text is placed differently and the "fuel gauge" strip on the right hand side has been painted over. Above you can see Johhny placed Janne´s text correct according the pictures with the "Kawasaki" reaching behind the curvature on the tank side. Mine is as it is...

My tank and seat.

 Since I was determined to use my tank as it is, Johnny had to color match the paint from a used, 40 year old paint, that was torn and pale in places etc, etc. We had a discussion about it a week ago  when Johnny found a spot where the clear coat had vanished just in front of my gas cap. I wanted the color I polished up at the rear part of the tank. Johnny said the paint beneath the damaged clear coat probably would be more correct but there was no way to get it out on the whole tank. It had to be the more aged, yellowed tone on the bigger part of the tank. Look at the picture above. The color match is great! I think he is one of the best painters we have here in Sweden when it comes to matching old colors with new paint. I´m SO pleased with his work!

Seat with rubber grommet and set cover.

 The striping of the seat became just right! He nailed it. I´m so pleased that my old battered seat cover works so well with the new paint. I might just have to weather the surface of the new paint a little bit to match it even better in the future. We´ll see...

Two H1R seats.

Remember I talked about my old, dry, rotten tires last time....? Well, I got them back! Jean-Francois Balde of France is a magician! can you tell which pair of tires in the picture below is new and which is restored (my old ones...). I kid you not! It is virtually impossible to tell unless you know. The two on top are the new ones and the two at the bottom are my old ones! 50 Euros per tire to clean and restore is a bargain! To be honest I haven´t driven on them  yet, and maybe they will tear down quickly, I have no idea! I think I´ll put the new ones on and use them when testing the bike and then (maybe) put the older ones on for display. That is a question to be dealt with much later. For now I´m happy to have two sets of usable tires for the bike!

Racing tires x 4.

This has been a long and wonderful day in many aspects. It´s always great fun to meet Johnny and have a chat. He makes good coffee as well....

As I said before, tomorrow is back to work. The bike sits for a few days and when I get back I´ll have to continue working on the wheels and also start  putting the frame, swing arm and front fork back together. All very fun and inspiring work!

Until then, stay cool in the summer heat, keep the front wheel down and have a cold one!

Your´s truly.

/Per

Front fork stanchions and the need to get a second opinion.

Summer is moving a long here in Sweden. We passed midsummer last weekend and now we look forward to days getting shorter again... That means the motorcycle season is in full swing and we all try to get as many miles on two wheels as possible during the short and intense summer months.

In between the bike rides there´s also time to fettle a bit with bike restorations. A few things has evolved since last time.

My body kit went out to Janne a couple of weeks ago and he´s going to take his and mine to Johnny´s Mc-lack in the near future. If he´s not already done so.  The rear wheel is for a friend who´s Vespa had a flat tire. Brought it along since I was driving around town anyway.

About a week ago my stanchions were ready at the grinders! What a job they did! superb workmanship and excellent service. It took a while, but it was well worth the wait, and the very humane pricing. The sliding surfaces are perfect and also perfect in measurement. 5 to 6 hundreds of a millimeter of clearance to the inner surface of the outer leg. Should be just fine. Here you can see the top part of the original tube and the new ones I bought from Italy. They are from a Yamaha RD250 1973-75 and seem to be exactly the same on the inside but a tad long and also not milled off at the top like the stock ones are.

Here´s the top view of the legs. You can imagine the threads are at the approximate same height from the bench, the repro tube is just longer above the threads. That suits me just fine!

They need to be cut about 6 mm or so. And reduced to 32mm at the top triple tree as well.

The difference in thickness of the tubes is clearly visible here. I imagine they saved some weight by reducing the stanchions diameter, but they must have lost some strenght in the process?





















So, now it was time to find someone who could mill my tubes to specifications... Janne have an old friend with a mill but he wasn´t sure about it.

- "Naa, you need a CNC-mill to that properly, and I don´t have one". "Talk to the guys at XXXXXXX AB, they do jobs for Janne and many others in the motorcycle community"

OK, a trip to that business a bit south of Stockholm and a friendly discussion about what needed to be done, when they would be able to do it and at what cost. I´m not that sensitive when it comes to paying for stuff and said I could pay up to 600 USdollars to get it done. The total cost to restore my stock stanchions reached over 800 bucks... I figured that would be OK. They needed a week to look at the job and we agreed I could go there and pick up my stock pipe after a week and we would discuss further about the job.

I had a nagging feeling on the way home.... I need a second opinion on this matter! I called the guys in "Konturverktyg AB" in Kungens kurva just south of town. That´s where I went to try and copy the stanchions earlier, remember?

- " The best guy we have is on vacation right now, but he can have a look at it next week"

Perfect! One week later I went back to the first company and picked up my stuff. They wouldn´t be able to do anything before August anyway and it was a bit complicated to mill in such hard surfaces and what not...

I went to Kungens kurva and to Belim and the guys at Konturverktyg instead and were told they would have look at it and let me know within a week. Fair enough.

The day after, THE DAY AFTER, Belim wrote me a text: "Your legs are done, Drago did them this morning"

WOW! One day, a fraction of the price and a super job done! I´ll take all my problems in the future to these guys, that is for sure. I ended up having my stanchions ready two months earlier and paid less than a third of what I was prepared to pay the others.

To be fair, they never got a chance to actually do the job, and I don´t know what their final price would be. But I´m a happy camper!

As you can see here Drago did an excellent job milling the hard chrome away and cutting of the 6 millimeters at the top. My measurement ´s and drawings can also be seen here.

Drawing of stanchion milling.

The picture above shows what you need to do to adapt a front fork stanchion from Yamaha RD250 1973-75 to fit the Kawasaki H1R... Not too bad!

My old tubes (the originals) on top and the two copies below. I think the surface looks great, just like the stock ones. No surface treatment, no paint, no chrome, no nothing!
The problem will be choosing which ones to put on the bike....??

The bottom ends look a bit different but I don´t think that will matter at all. I tried to push the repro tubes fully into the outer leg and there was no sticking what so ever. They came right up without any problems. That chamfering at the bottom isn´t necessary. It actually poses a risk to mill down the hard chrome surface at that point. Belim didn´t recommend it....

The difference in surface finish is quite obvious here. If I were to build a bike as new I would use the new ones, but I´m trying to keep true to my concept of a bike that has been used for a few races. For now I´ll go with the stock ones. They are also "Kawasaki" parts, don´t forget.

Look at the tops! Now you can´t really tell which one is stock and which one is a copy....!!
This process is finished and I´m very, very pleased with the result.

As I have mentioned before, you find new friends all over the place with a unique project like this.
Jean Francois Balde in France is one of them. My friend Francis Taillefumier knew Jean Francois and got us in contact. Jean francois sold me these brand new racing tires. THANKS A LOT!!  Exactly the same type I had on the bike. He will also try and restore my old tires! He has a method where old, hard rubber can be softened and be as new again. I´m SO excited to see if this really works...

Doesn´t that look great! Brand new tires for my H1R... Now I need to get cracking with the wheels! I have tried polishing a bit here and there, but it is so tedious work...

Polishing.

I´ll end this post with a picture of my nearest future with the project. Wheel cleaning and polishing... I´m not done yet, not even close. There´s a whole lot of work to be done on these. I try hard not to take them all apart and repaint and rezink everything to as new condition, but I must refrain from doing that! I need to be able to keep that patina at least on the wheels.... Please help me!

Now I´m off for vacation for a couple of weeks and that means no work on the racer for a while. Bare with me, next time I´ll probably have more information on the wheels or maybe I´ve started to put the frame together and mount the front fork or so...

Keep cool out there in the heat!

Another thing I must mention is the new policy of  Photobucket... This is (or used to be...) a "free" picture service I´ve been using for more than 10 years. All my blog pictures, forum pictures and other places i use pictures in posts and links have gone completely bananas! If I want to keep using my so called "3rd party links" I had to upgrade to their biggest, most expensive plan... 400 Dollars a year!! That sucks so intensely I am having problems typing straight...!! I see it as a RANSOM to be paid to get your links back. The alternative is to sit down and edit ALL posts from the last 10 years and link them from another site where you first have to move all your images. I paid up. But I´m still mad as H**L!!

/Per