The Heart of the Matter

Today is the day I have dreamt about for a very long time. My RD400 motor was assembled and ready to be picked up!! I arrived a few minute before 9am at Paul's house. As always, he had his garage opened already and was waiting for me. I saw the engine and tt was beautiful!

He helped me install the shift rod and tachometer drive components. Then he went over the break-in routine for the motor. Of course, half of that went in one ear and out the other. We told stories, he helped me to load all the parts into my Jeep, then I was off.

I spent part of the rest of the day cleaning engine mounting parts, mixing and matching with a spare set that I had on hand. One of my front mount spacer tubes got slightly dented, so the mounting bolt didn't want to slide through, meaning I had to use one of the yucky corroded ones. I tried cleaning/polishing it for a while with some success, but in the end, I just wanted to plug the motor in the frame, so the refurbishing will have to wait till the motor moves to the other frame. I also discovered that I am one rear mounting bolt short of a full set! After scouring through my archive of old documentation photos, I noticed that I never even had one in the first place! Thank God for eBay! In the end, I was successful in mounting the motor in the frame, minus one rear mounting bolt.

I fitted the carbs on the engine, then the Y-boot with the K&N air filter on it. (I still have to locate the manifold clamps. I hope I don't need to order more parts!) Surprisingly, the filter sticks way above the frame rails where the new seat will go. Hmmm...I don't ever recall anyone making mention of this problem. I do know that K&N makes a shorter filter. Maybe others have been using the short filters? In any case, I do happen to have a foam Unifilter that I can fit on there if I don't feel like buying a another K&N filter.

This week is going to be hella busy. I'm working a shit ton of hours and weird shifts, due to coworkers taking random vacation days off, and the management not hiring much needed extra help. I'm also shoving off for a cruise to Alaska on Friday. Of course I have to work all the way through Thursday, then take my dog and drop off a second car at a relative's house after work, not to mention that it's actually my birthday that day :(

But if I get the chance, I would love to start hooking up some cables, getting a little closer to a "complete" bike, so I can get the bike VIN verified by my local DMV. What a total hassle!!!!

Learning to Braze

Lately I've been inundated with work hours, plus other shit is going down in my life lately. So work on the RD has been slow lately. I've kind of been dragging my feet- some of it is just laziness, as I've been stuck in my head about solutions for seat mounting and stuff.

I have two RD400 frames and on both of them, the steering stopper tab/button has been knocked off. I was lucky enough to be able to relocate one of the original tabs- it was from my original Marsh frame. Since I will be riding the Primrose frame, the one that I'll be cutting up, I really need to have a button on that one. In case you have no idea what piece I'm speaking of, from the Yamaha factory, there is a small metal tab that is welded to the front of the headstock. It works in conjunction with the bottom triple tree clamp, which has a couple of stopper tabs sticking up. If the handlebars move too far to the left or to the right, the triple tree tab will effectively hit the stationary stopper welded to the headstock, preventing the steering from turning any further, therefore (in theory) stopping your handlebar (or triple tree nut) from putting a dent in your gas tank. Well, my bike has gone down a few times and the force of the crashes were probably strong enough to break the welds. I presume the Primrose frame suffered the same fate.

After putting some thought into how to address my missing steering stopper tab, I eventually decided to try brazing it back onto the frame myself. So I'm stealing the tab off the Marsh frame and brazing it onto the Primrose frame. The first attempt didn't go so good. I was smart enough to know that I needed a hotter flame than propane, so I bought a canister of map gas. But still that steel was way too thick to let the heat penetrate.

I thought that maybe a better torch handle could bring more heat, so I stopped by my local Lowes hardware store. They just happened to have a Bernzomatic kit that came with map gas and oxygen!! For only $70, it was worth giving it a whack. After I bough it, I went home and read the reviews, which were not good. Apparently people were having problems with the flame blowing out and the sensitivity of the controls. I searched a little more and found some helpful videos on how to get the flame to ignite and how to do careful adjustments.

This video is really a life-saver! It will save you from valuable minutes of wasted oxygen consumption.

It really didn't take long for the headstock metal to heat up. I used the bronze rod and after doing three sides, the welds seemed very strong! I am confident this stopper will hold, even after a crash!

 

So now that I have a little bit of brazing skills, I'm probably going to braze some nuts or T-nuts directly to the frame, so I can fasten the seat pan down. I believe that I will also have to braze a cross-member to the back of the frame, so I have somewhere to mount the rear brake lamp. I'm still working out the details and dimensions on these last two points. When these things are done, I can finally take this frame to the powdercoater! And when I finally cut down that front fender, I'll be able to haul all my parts to my Sacramento painter!