Its mid August and I getting ready for a trip to Los Angeles to visit some good ole friends and get a taste for the wild life of LA.  When I get back my day job will begin to ramp up.  So I am anticipating a down turn with regard to the build.  Which is why I wanted to take a moment to give my assessment of what we've done so far.  Keeping in mind that Frazier may have another idea of whats going on.

Chris Rucci, dropped off his once and former trailer he used when racing.  Frazier agreed to store the sucker but we had one problem, the keys for the Master locks had been lost.  The video is the grinding wheel eating up the lock.  I remember the commercials for Master lock when they shot a hole int he lock and it was still locked. Who knew it would take a simple grinding wheel?

Up to this point I feel like we have been working on a rather steady pace considering most of the work is done on a weekly basis.  I often wonder about my productivity, if I was given a month to work on one project without interruption.  But that is really just some Utopian day dream. 

Today was the first time since we began the project that we had the bike off the center and/or lift.  To our amazement it was so much lower then we thought, especially since we had limited amount of adjustment in the forks.  That said, about a 3/4 of inch makes a significant difference with the overall height of the bike. Based on the "look" of the bike we have decided to stay with the original rear fender.  Originally we were going to chop it but now it just seems to fit, with a bench seat the fender will continue that straight line with the curve to bookend the bike.

So we have decided to take a break from working on the breaks.  After the rebuild we discovered that the master cylinder was basically shot.  We had two choices, buy a new one or we could order a rebuild kit.  While we contemplated our choices we decided to do some body work, at the very least we woudl be abel to grind and cut metal.  The result is some progress that we could see and feel.  Just what we needed after an entire build day covered in brake fluid.

This is the first time either of us have ever really worked on brakes.  What we knew was that brakes can take some time to get done.  Not to mention the sheer importance of stopping.  Our initial inspection of the brakes gave us a slight glimmer of hope that they were working.

That's is until we opened the Master Cylinder.  Inside we found that the brake fluid had actually dried up.  So once we cleaned out the brake fluid nuggets, we added some new fluid and worked on bleeding the brake lines.  Yeah, we knew that we probably had no chance of getting the brakes to work but we wanted to go through the process just to be sure.  And we were sure.  So we knew what we had to do, pull the brakes and replace the lines.  Over all cleaning the brakes was not a tough job but we did learn that you will need a significant amount of pressure air to get the piston out of the caliper housing.

In our case we had to take a drive to North Hills Exxon.  It took about 500psi to pop that piston out of the housing.

Now that we have stripped off most of the parts that we really didn't want or need we decided to see if we could get the bike running.  For this we did nothing more than add some gas, oil and changed out the old spark plugs.  Our idea was to get a baseline of what we were dealing with. 

Once we had everything in place we were able to get the bike to turn over.  But we coudln't keep the engine running.  So at the very least we knew that with some heavy duty cleaning we could get the engining running.  During this process we discovered that the exhaust was shot.  There was too much rust.