The Paso Project - Page 4

This is going a little slower than I was expecting, but 1-3 week waits on parts is the culprit. With how screwed up every aspect of this bike seems to be, though, the "advantage" to it all is that while I'm waiting on parts to repair/correct one thing, I can always move on to another. As it stands right now, the carbs are cleaned and back on the bike, but I'm waiting for some more parts before I can complete the installation. Here's how they are looking on the bike, now....




When reinstalling the intake manifolds to their correct heads, I noticed that they each had a different screws in them where some models have a sensor hooked up, I believe. One of them was far too long and went well into the intake passage. I have since replaced both screws with identical ones and eliminated this obstruction in the intake...





I took a few pictures of the gas tank a while ago, but because I dread the idea of working on it, I haven't posted them. I also don't need to do any work on it until I know the bike is running, so I've just got it sitting in the corner of the room...waiting for me to give it some attention. It appears that someone had tried to seal the tank previously, but probably didn't do it correctly, as that is peeling up. I've been doing some research on Kreem and Por-15 products to clean the inside of the tank, but I'll have a little while until I have to worry about messing with them...







During the last couple of weeks, I also messed around with the tail-light assembly. I was thinking it had a Euro tail-light at first (with the turn signals incorporated into the tail-light), but it turned out to be a poor conversion by drilling two holes, adding a bulb fixture and then painting a lot of the interior of the housing silver. The previous owner said that the turn signals were not very bright, so he added the mudguard indicators. It probably would have been a decent conversion if the person had used some type of reflective material. I'm thinking if I were to want to go that route, I'd use some of those cheap, plastic mirrors (where it is mirror-coated plastic instead of silvered glass), but we will just use the mudguard indicators for now...



While messing with the carbs, I decided to see why the choke lever wasn't working very well. Turns out that the housing was put on the bike upside-down, it was missing a mounting screw and the other one was broken off and replaced by drilling an angled hole and using a roll-pin, an old wheel seal was used as a spacer for some reason, and the choke lever was actually hitting the clutch-lever housing when trying to rotate it....





Moving on to another aspect of the bike before trying to start it, I'm going to check/adjust the valves and put new timing belts on the engine. I'd hate to go through all this time and effort to fire the bike up, break a belt, and screw up the engine. I'm going to have to check the bearings on these tensioners. Hopefully, the surface rust is not an indicator of the bearing condition.





I didn't take a picture of it, but I had removed the rear wheel and found the rear wheel bearings are shot. I was already planning on replacing all the wheel bearings, but now I know that they definitely need to be replaced. I actually removed the rear wheel to inspect everything when I was installing a used chain that I got from a local bike shop for free. Once everything is up and running and checks out fine, I'll be replacing the chain with a new one. I mainly got the chain to help me rotate the engine to TDC for the valve check/adjust. I'm still curious about the condition of the swingarm bearings and seals...







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