Highlights reel... post Garage reno

During a debate about engine rebuilds this year, it was pointed out to me that many blogs about "rebuilding my first engine" end either in disaster, or the blog is never completed. Spoiler: My bike is finished of November 11th of this year. I did not want this blog to languish in the incomplete realm, so I have created a highlights reel of blogs that I should have posted:

Stripping the bike down to the bare frame was easy and I took lots of pictures. That being said, for all of you other newbies, no matter how many photos you take, it will never be enough. At least 4 times I could not find photos of things that I needed to see, but relied on shots that showed the fit from a bad angle, or I had to wait till I could take a look at one of the other three known 1968/69 CL450s in my area. TAKE PHOTOS UNTIL YOU THINK THAT YOU HAVE EVERYTHING AND THEN TAKE A BUNCH MORE... :-)

Cleaning the frame was a horrible job because this bike seems to have been abused off-road for much of the 36 years that it was not licensed for the road.

I found inches of mud and grass in nooks aound the engine and rear fender. dirt was ground into every place that had a fastener.

After months of cleaning (pre-garage reno) I was able to take stock. The most important thing that I discovered was that the chain guard was missing. In my search to find a replacement, I realized that the guard attaches to the swing arm in three places, but my swingarm had only two mounting points for it. Someone had ground off the middle mounting point.

You can see the leftover nub from the mount cutting, on the left top of the arm closest to you in the photo. I wish that I had had the wits to have discovered this problem as early as this blog will make it seem. But actually, as you can conclude from the nicely painted swingarm in the photo, I found it last year, after I put the chain on and realized that I had no guard to mount :-(.

I could have left it, and simply not had a bolt supporting the middle, but my old swingarm also seemed slightly bent when I attached my rear shocks. I bit the bullet and found another swingarm on E-Bay. The replacement swingarm has the mounting point and the shocks slid on almost effortlessly. I had to paint it to match the rest of the frame and avoid spraying over the original sticker that was still attached to this swingarm.

Front Cushions

Both of the front fork tubes were bent. 3 years on, I cannot remember by how much, but it was HUGE. I took them over to the shop of a friend, with a hydraulic press, and we went to work. The best we could do was on the right one, which we got to .04mm out, at the bend point. This was as close as we dared to press our luck, as we worried about bending it the other way. It was here, in this shop, that I discovered that the damping systems on these tubes were different from each other:

The one on the right in the photo was the one that was not proper (it was the left shock). I could find nobody who could identify what bike that damping system belonged to, but it was not for a Hellcat, so I began searching for new tubes (or at least one). I found them at CMSNL.com: 2 complete front cushions, NOS, for 250 euros each. The cost of just one tube alone was over 600 euros, so this was a great find (and I got the last two).

Seat

The original seat pan was covered in foam that was really not the shape that it needed to be, and the bike came with a replacement cover that could not go over it. It also had a plastic facimile of the trim strip that was completely useless because it would have to be crimped onto the cover (no attaching to the pan). When I took this to a local re-upholsterer, he quoted me over $2000 because he did not know how it was supposed to be shaped and would have to experiment. He told me that I would likely still not be satisfied with the outcome (he had me pegged). He also refused to use the plastic trim, so if I wanted him to include the trim, I would have to get a proper one (yikes). I haven't spoken to this guy since...

There were two original seats listed on E-Bay so I bought what looked like the better of the two.

As you can see it had a couple of small holes in the cover at the front which would need repair, and the foam had compressed so it would need support. In taking it apart to restore what I could, I also discovered that this seat was likely left on its side in a wet area for a long period of time. The left hand side of the seat pan was disintegrting and would need a good welder to repair it. Again, a friend of a friend, Bob Johnson from Johnson's Welding, in Kinburn Ontario, stepped in and completely repaired it. Here is the before:

and the after:

Bob also recommended an upstart auto upholstery company, in Carleton Place, Ontario, to re-fabricate the cover instead or repairing what was very fragile material. I checked out the company and decided to try them out. You can see what they did by watching their video at this link.

The whole cost of buying the unfortunate seat, getting the pan fixed, and getting foam and a new cover was about half of the cost that the first guy wanted (because, I'm sure that he was trying to get rid of me). I am really happy with the result.

Oh, and before you ask... The first seat pan was missing more than half of it's hold-down clips (for the cover) and it had been bronze welded where it had been split (likely by a heavy rider and a hard bounce). Bob and I did consider both of them, but the new pan seemed a better specimen for repair because there was no way to be sure that the old one would not have split again.

Adding a Rear Rack

I wanted a rack for the back, and I found one from a 1969 CL450 on E-Bay. It was a bit surface-rusted, but I was able to get rid of that quite well. Because of how low it sits over the rear light, I have my doubts that it was made for a CL450, but oh, I like the look!!

As I previously mentioned, the bike is done. I tested it offroad on Rememberance Day of this year (November 11) and it is ready for it's safety inspection. I cannot wait to get her back on the road this spring. Here is what she looked like on 11 November 2023:

There was obviously a lot more that I had to do, which would have been written about if I had made the time. If there is anything: like re-chroming, lacing the wheels, fixing the instrumentation, wiring... Please, just leave me a message in the comments and I will dig into my thousands of photos and tell that story.