The Friday before I left (April 2) was a beautiful day, and I was determined to get my bike together before leaving the continent on the 5th. I needed the cam chain tensioner gaskets, and although I had ordered them online the sunday before, but they still hadn't shown up and I was getting impatient. My dad and I hopped in his Mustang and headed down to State 8 Motorcycles to pick up the needed gaskets. After getting the address wrong, we ended up doing a lot of extra driving, but with the sun shining and the top down, it was a perfect afternoon to drive around together, as we wouldn't be seeing each other for the next few months.
When we finally got to State 8, it was rather busy. They had 5 of the gaskets in stock. I bought 3. After the ride back north and a stop for some pizza, Dad dropped me off at home. VeeDub stopped over a little while later and helped me with the reassembly work.
The tensioners are spring loaded to, obviously, keep tension on the cam chains. The ones I had seen on Mike D's bike had a ratcheting mechanism to keep them fully retracted during installation. Mine, being an older design, werent so friendly. There's a recessed screw in the middle and you have to turn (against spring pressure) to retract it. There is no locking mechanism. It was time to make a tool.
The hole with the screw is pretty small, so I had to take a screwdriver to the grinding wheel to narrow it up a bit. For installing the front cylinder's tensioner, a simple 90* bend in the screwdriver would do the job.
With the modified screwdriver, and the carbs still on the bench, installing the front tensioner was pretty straightforward.
The rear tensioner was another story. For one thing, it's probably one of the hardest parts to reach. You can't see it from the position you need to be in to install it. The 90* screwdriver was too bulky to fit along with my hands. VeeDub came up with the needed design for the tool which was pretty genius. We added two more 90* bends to the screwdriver, which would then hook on one of the mounting screws, which also held the gasket in line. We used a wood screw (covered in black tape, to prevent galling) as a dowel pin.
It worked like a charm. After getting the rear tensioner in, there was a bunch of other reassembly work that could begin. Both cam covers could go back on, the radiator could go back on, the carbs, the air box, and the gas tank. At this point, we were able to do a quick start up of the engine. On the first startup, it was only running on one cylinder and the tach didn't work, which was a bit of a bummer. A little investigating revealed a connector which had come off one of the coils. Sliding it back on its terminal, we now had two cylinders and a working tach. Success!
Now it was time to do the mod I've been waiting a long time to do -- the rear fender eliminator. The stock rear fender is hideous looking. Last year, Dub and I had trimmed some of the excess length off of it, which helped, but I had seen pictures on SVrider.com of guys who had cut it off completely. It really cleans up the lines in the back and looks *way* better, IMO.
The rear fender is part of the undertray. At the left side, which ends up right under the seat is where the battery resides. As you move to the right, that's the area between the two seats, and the area under the rear seat (the trunk). You basically need to cut off the area right in front of the turn signals.
As this is a well-known modification in the SV world, there is a template available on the internet to cover up the now-created hole in the trunk area. Oddly, for the fact that this is a well-known mod with the template available, the instructions for actually cutting the fender off aren't clear-cut (pun intended). We winged it and did pretty good. The template appeared to be much larger than actually needed, and I had read other people say the same thing about it, so we ended up cutting it down a bit. The black along the curved edge is just vacuum tubing that I slit to try to form a gasket-like seal against the taillight.
The beauty of trimming the template down is that the scrap piece was perfect to bend into a piece for re-mounting the stock turn signals and license plate. I forgot to take pictures of that, though. No matter, as the thin sheet metal is not really good material for that kind of bracket. It functions, but I'll have to come up with something else when I get back home.
This is the finished product. I can't find a good pic at the moment to show a good before/after of the rear fender, but as far as I'm concerned, it looks waaaay better. It was a long day, and I didnt get to go for my first test ride until 3 or 4am or so Saturday morning.
I finally went to bed and Saturday was as nice as Friday. I was able to get in about 100 miles of riding. The engine ran great with the newly rebuilt carbs and adjusted valves. The mid-throttle stutter was gone. However, I now have a very noticeable oil leak. I didn't investigate it at all before I left, but it has to be coming from the rear cylinder. It'd be nice if it's the cam cover and not the tensioner, but I doubt I'll get that lucky. But it was a nice treat to be able to ride before I left.
WOW -- long post. It's taken me a couple hours to write all this up, find and re-size the pictures, etc. But I have nothing better to do down here anyway.
-Dave