Re: Harley Sprint (no ST)

[Eric Sheley <eric@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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


 *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
 The ST Mailing list is sponsored by the Unofficial ST Website
   http://www.TriumphNet.com/st for ST and Mailing List info

=-=-=-= Next Message =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

End of st-digest V1999 #212
***************************


 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

                   End of Triumph ST Digest
 Digest sponsored by the Unofficial Triumph Sprint ST Website
   http://www.TriumphNet.com/st for ST and Mailing List info

          This digest Copyright 1999 TriumphNet.com