The Tear Down
The restoration started out inocuous enough. I was just going to replace my rear tire. Somewhen between the act of repacking the wheel bearing and being fascinated by the rear drive gear I decided to start the restoration. Humble beginnings indeed.
I decided to create some guidelines that would make the experience more rewarding and increase my chances for success. The first was that I would not spend any money that I didn't have in hand. The second was that I not pressure myself to get it done in any timeframe. The third that I wasn't going to throw one of our cars out into the street and turn my garage into a motorcycle shop.
Last but not least, I will use local shops only for painting, powder coating, parts and service. We are very blessed here in the Northwest to have a very strong skilled craftsman tradition. I believe it has a lot to do with Boeing, Todd Shipyard, Tacoma Boat and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard creating and attracting skilled journeyman over the past one hundred years or so. I must also include the thousands of skilled fabricators and engineers working for the smaller contractors who support these entities.
I've divided the dismantling sections in the rough order I performed them, electrical, chassis and engine.
Electrical
The electrical system on the Yanma (dragonfly) is mostly external. There's no wires that run through the frame or handlebars. Which means that if I want to take anything other than the tank, side covers and seat off I had better remove the electrical system first.
I actually began removing the electrical system when I removed the rear fender. The tail light and the blinker lights are mounted on the back and a mounting plate for the regulator and rear blinker switch is mounted on the front of the fender near the battery pan.
So I worked my way forward from there. I took special care to tag every end of every wire. I then wrote the tag numbers down on diagrams of each electrical component such as the regulator.
Yes, I'm meticulous, but only because my memory is bad. I don't want to get stuck trying to remember how all the system goes back together. As it is, I will have to replace most if not all the wire. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a wiring harness for my year and model. I found one for the civilian model, but not the police model. Not a big deal, but now I'm really glad I tagged all the wires. I'm not the most skilled guy with the soldering gun but I hope to be by the time I finish the wiring. We'll see.
Get a look at the back side of the console and the fuse box inside the headlamp casing. I will need to replace every wire. Holy crap!
Chassis
As I was dismantling the Guzzi one of the first things I noticed was that even though every single part could use some cleaning and/or polishing the bike as a whole has been well cared for over the years. A lot of times when a bike is abused or disused it's owners will neglect to replace parts that have worn out or fallen off the bike. They'll just continue to run without it or jury rig it. But on the Yanma in all cases someone or someones had replaced these parts. I found SAE hex bolts, soldered wiring splices, paint touch ups, etc. Nothing fancy, just those little things that keep a bike safe and sound. Above all else this has reaffirmed my appreciation of this fine motorcycle and how fortunate I was to find it.
Back to the chassis. Even though the drive shaft between the transmission and the rear drive is supposed to be dry, I noticed a couple of cc's of broke down 90W in the housing. I was a little worried that perhaps one of my seals, either tranny or rear drive was leaking. However after a call to Moto International in Seattle I found out that its common to put some 90W into the housing after the shaft has been worked on or the boot has been replaced (there was a split boot on it).
The u-joint slipped out easily, but the sealed bearing that the shaft runs through is a monster to remove. I began by hammering the daylights out of it with a hard plastic dowel and a hammer. I then tried hammering the daylights out of it while heating with a propane torch. Next I tried prizing it out with a length of all thread, putting nuts and washers on either end and tightening them (while heating with a torch). I was having some movement of the bearing with this method when the steel washer on the bearing end of the all thread folded back like an umbrella in the wind. It popped through the center of the bearing, nut and all. Nice.
I finally removed the bearing by using a four foot length of 1" galvanized pipe like a slide hammer on the lip of the bearing. Even though I got the bearing out, it really sucked pounding that hard on the swing arm. I'm not really looking forward to putting the new bearing back in.
There is an amazing number of steel parts about the size of my hand. The shift lever and left floorboard sub-assembly has about seven parts and weighs about 10 pounds (no wonder the Guzzi is so goddamned heavy).
My friend let me borrow his motocycle jack, but it just didn't fit the loop frame well. So I decided to do as much disassembly as I could using the center stand (and front wheel). This allowed me to strip everything but the front wheel and the center stand from the bike.
When I was ready to remove the front end, I raised the engine of the bike onto a couple of 4x12 wooden blocks that I put on a swivel wheel dolley. This also made it easier to move the bike around.
The front forks were challenging because when I tried to remove the top plug bolts the whole tops of the forks unthreaded instead. So I got out the penetrating oil and secured the tops of the forks with vice grips using wood as chafing gear. Fortunately there was little resistence so I didn't have to get rough with it.
At this point the only thing left on the frame was the center stand and the engine.
Engine
With everything removed but the engine, it's removal was fairly easy. I did decide to remove the cylinders first though. I'm glad I did. Even with the reduced weight it was a little tricky (for me) to angle it out of its hole.
There was nothing tricky about removing the cylinders. I just had to make sure to keep all left and right cyclinder parts separate from each other. I did need to pound on the pistons' pins to get them out. I was careful to support the connecting rods so they didn't get warped.
The heads will need to have their valves checked. The right exhaust port threads are toast so this will need to be repaired as well.
With the cans off, I blocked the engine to make it easy to remove its mount rods as well as to prevent it from dropping to the floor. It wasn't so much that I removed the engine from the frame but rather I removed the engine and frame from each other. Like one of those steel ring puzzles. It worked well with little lifting on my part.
Polishing
