Busy weekend!
I took Friday off work, purely with the intent of making some progress on the chassis. Partly out of necessity, as I'm looking forward to getting some work done in the garage soon, and therefore for a few days I'll need to try and cram all the bikes into the workshed - and having as much of the clutter of 851 parts assembled is an ideal way of saving space.
The frame, subframes and top yoke and clip-ons were previously painted, and when I had time over the last few weeks, I had been preparing them for use, so it went together remarkably quickly.
Of course, the hard part is the loom, as is usually the case, although you deliberately take as many photos of the bike as you can prior to disassembly, they never seem to capture enough detail in order to make re-wiring the chassis easy. There were a few episodes of assembly/looming/cursing/disassembly/relooming.
Even now, I've got a bunch of connections that I can't recall where they came from or connected to, and progress is slow while I research each one to refresh my poor memory. The blue one from the left hand controls is currently eluding me. I presume that it's something to do with the headlight flash, but I'll need to check the wiring diagram to be sure.
The rear subframe went together relatively easily with brand new rubber mounts for the relays at the bike and the ECU. Because I had to drill almost every bolt out that holds the tray in place, some of those fixing holes are a touch damaged (through heat), so there is the worlds supplies of washers in there holding everything in place.
The throttle bodies went in easily enough (after a bit of gentle persuasion), but now that I look at it - I'm a touch concerned with the fuel line routing - there is definately potential for it to touch the connecting rod, preventing the butterflies from closing fully. I'll need to re-visit that.
I'm also a touch concerned with the HT leads. Noting that the vertical cylinder lead didn't easily go on to the plug, I investigated further to find that the wee sparkplug screw tip had seized into the end of the lead. I wonder how well this bike ran, because that means that it possibly didn't have a solid connection onto the V plug. Once I'd extracted it, I checked the leads for continuity - the old plugs had a lot of corrosion on them, and the connection on the inside of the leads looked like they had been washed regularly in the North Sea. I couldn't find a good continuity on the vertical lead, and the horizontal one wasn't much better. New leads now on order.
As a reminder - here's how it looked when I started:
Current state of progress:
