We're in ur house, fixing ur bikes! Project VFR! (pic heavy)

[Ginger]

Well, some of you may remember my '87 VFR a'sploding...



Back a brief back track - it was 100% disassembled on April 9th because of a repetative electrical system failure.

I expected to part it out on ebay. A month later, though, I found a parts bike in Georgia and couldn't help myself. I rented an SUV, put RJ in the passenger seat, and drove down to get it. We stayed with Jess & Chan (Thanks!), and he and Scotty took us out for dinner and drinks (sorry guys, I don't put out on the first date)... pretty cool trip... aside from the, what, 16 hours in the truck?

The bike sat for a few months, and eventually I sorted through everything I had. A few MM'ers that came to a party I had early in the summer might remember helping me swap motors between two frames, and throw parts at stuff, and all that. I told myself that I'd hook stuff up, connect a battery, and put some serious effort into the project if I could get the swapped motor to crank.

It didn't.

Phil wouldn't let me give up on the project, though, and insisted on working with me for a day before giving up hope. And this is what happened....

We got started on a nice sunny afternoon in October.



Phil, being the professional wrench, made a game plan...



I did what he told me to.



He picked up a wiring diagram from Coleman... it taught us a lot things, most importantly that the little black ignition box is very important and very majikal.



And lots of progress was made - hope was renewed.

The plan was to completely open up the wiring harness and remove everything non-essential to running. This would prevent whatever was frying batteries from occuring again and also help us debug the factory switchgear issues.



The visual progress alone was enough to restore my motivation, but Phil managed to push us farther along and we got spark by the end of the day - the way we did it was gimpy, but it worked:



Next we had to tackle using a real starter button because we bypassed the controls on the clip ons, put wire ends back on the parts of the harness we stripped off, and pretty much tie up simple ends that we left hanging. Finish one thing before we moved on to the next.

So back to work on a new day... beginning of November.




Actually, that might have been Saturday night before Matt's party.. I'm pretty sure it was.

Phil started tearing apart the carbs. I had two sets, one from a 1990 that was pretty gummed up, but complete, and the carbs that came on my bike - 1987 - but were missing a boot to connect to the heads.



We got distracted and moved on to un-seizing the fuel pump. If you reverse the polarity and run it you can sometimes bring a stuck one back to life.



So that's what we did.



And it worked, and was great. We pumped stuff from one beer bottle to another, and back again. And then I looked at the clock.

Late for Matt's party - sweet! (sorry, Matt)

My laundry room looked funny after that.



We were on a roll, mostly because of Phil.

Today we got back to business. I started work on attaching the headers and Phil went back to the carbs. For anybody unfamiliar with Honda's V4 - anything having to do with the intake, or removal of combustion stuff is a pain in the ass. Big.

The headers were missing some hardware, so I picked up some replacements from sears (so much for "6mm Nut - Special" listed in the fiche) and did my best to come up with wierd universal-extention-universal-size adapter-wrench combinations to tighten the rear bank.



I don't have any pics of how tight the rear bank was, but it took me over an hour to get the two pipes back there completely mounted. The fronts, obviously, were easy.

And Phil carbeurated.



He knows carbs. I do not.



I did do something with them, though. I put the boots on - hooray!



Phil figured he could clean up the carbs from the 1990 and we'd put them on.

Well, guess what? They didn't fit.

Honda changed the intake angle from 87 to 90 so the carb mounting plate was just different enough to not work.

Have no fear, though, swap plates and we could still use the freshly cleaned carbs.

With some dremel work.



You can see where he had to alter the mounting plate to accomodate the newer carbs (the little divet ground out of each circle).

That created a new problem, though. The boots on the '87 were a different size than the '90 and I only had 3.

So I called Coleman.



And they didn't have one.

So we made one.



Don't laugh. It works for now.

And we had a set of carbs ready to go on the bike.



Remember how I said that intake and exhaust stuff was a bitch on these bikes? Half an hour of pushing and jumping on the 'new' carbs resulted in zero progress.

Not completely zero, though.

Earlier I put a starter on



And Phil had wired in a spare black box.



Two of something majikal is better than one. Hooray spares!

And then we had an idea for the carbs.

Leverage!



And then we had a time crunch. And my phone rang twice. And we rushed around like madmen to try and meet our goal of getting the bike running.



And then something happened.



Something big.

Phil and I have been turning wrenches together for 6 or 7 years. We went into 'get shit done' mode and pushed the bike outside. 5 minutes of cursing and running around later we had a running motorcycle!



It doesn't look like much, but it really runs!

We've got a lot of ends to tie up now that we've reached our goal. The fuel system needs work, the carbs will need good tweaking, it'll need a chain, more switchgear, and so on down the line. Lots of work.

This represents a major achievement, though. The motor is from my original VFR, the frame and wiring harness are from the Georgia pickup, and everything else got so mixed up that I couldn't say where it came from.

I'll keep this updated for anybody interested.

[ScottyB]

that's awesome. i don't really have a huge interest in bikes but this is a pretty neat job you've done

[CaptainHenreh]

I don't know why, but I love this bike.

[.RJ]

The motor is from my original VFR

T3h 400,000 mile VFR?

[Maengelito]

you're all nuts... i love it!

i dont know how you guys are able to photo-document all this stuff. i'm usually cursing or my hands are all nasty from grease and whatnot to pick up a camera

[.RJ]

i'm usually cursing or my hands are all nasty from grease and whatnot to pick up a camera

My camera is really dirty. My camera also doesnt work sometimes. Coincidence...

[Dave]

good story Andrew, I know you're happy it's running again. What's the goal for this bike?

[BLINGMW]

so.... this means you pretty solidly lost the bet you made with RJ right? :lol:

[.RJ]

Oh he lost that a long time ago

[Dragon]

Congrats man!!! Glad to see it's running again.

[Evan]

awwww....thats almost cute enough for a myspace pic!


ps- less VFR talk, more dirt bike talk (but congrats anyway)

[Beej]

Cool story, Hansel. Your busted shit makes my busted shit look amazing.

And I'm with Maeng on taking pictures.

[PGK]

What's the goal for this bike?

If you want to get technical, all stated goals have been acheivedÔÇöAndrew's only goal was to hear it run. done! kick it to the curb before you go crazy!

first post. word.

[Feersty]

Everyone needs a Ducati mechanic

[Ginger]

Like Phil (PGK) said, I wanted to get it running, and we did. It didn't properly run, per se, there was a little bit of carb cleaner and a lot of ingenuity involved, but it did, as a matter of fact, run. The next major stepping stone will be properly running, reliably. I'd like to get the operational features functioning - all the switchgear, seal up leaks, put a chain on it, seal up the [defunct] wiring harness, and so forth. The kind of odds and ends you'd expect you 'd need to take care of for a track bike (don't get any ideas, that's a maybe). After the "running regular" thing is taken care of we're going to build an auxilury lighting harness and that will also be a big piece to tackle. End goal - proper streetfighter.

We threw the body panels we're going to use on, and the gas tank the other day to get a feel of what we're going to have when it's completed. It'll be unique, that's for sure. I'd venture to say that nobody is going to expect the direction we're going to take.... but I'm getting ahead of myself, that's all in due time.

I wish I had pictures from the trip to Georgia and the motor swap. Those are the only two big things that didn't get documented. I'm going to keep being anal about a picture record, though, because I think it will be really cool to look back and see how the bike has come along.

... and yes, I very much hardcore lost the bet with RJ.

Thanks for the kind words - I'm really psyched about the progress. I've got a couple small videos I'll upload soon.

[Evan]

I've got a couple small videos I'll upload soon.

enough about your sister, I thought we were talking about the VFR?

[Ginger]

As promised:

After we got the motor to crank we realized it didn't have spark - hence the tearing into the wiring harness. This was our first succesful trial after creating a really big mess:



The fuel pump seized up from sitting since April. We had worked all day on other projects and when we finally moved on to the pump it seemed way more nifty than it actually was to watch it work when we fixed it. You can't really see anything in the vid, but, well, it's there

[PGK]

man, those vids suck.

[Ginger]

This video is really dark, but we wanted to document it running. It sounds great - my neighbors all know first hand.

*If anybody has any video editing experience and wants to give a hand at increasing the quality for a screen size tradeoff or wants to play with the color and make it a little less dark, that'd be cool, hint hint.

[Mike]

send me a version that isn't flv and i'll make it look pretty tomorrow.