Continue with some cleaning and painting

Still undecided what happens with the fuel tank, shall I use the Custom Tank or the normal road tank, or even build a custom one with fiber glass...

Meanwhile I started cleaning and painting some of the components...

Project tank

I will go with the "Custom" style tank, and admit, it's not the "easy way" but hey, this project is not meant to last only a couple of month. In order to complicate things even more I decided to narrow the tank of something like 2 to 3 cm depending on the overall fitting. As with all project that I start I need a "point of no return" which usually consists in destroying something for later rebuild, fix, etc..
This time after having removed all the paint, it is the tank that I cut in halves.

I found quite a lot of rust in the tank, good opportunity to clean it and make it all shiny in the inside again.

 Some Chlorine and water, an old battery from a Harley Sportster and here we go.. Chemical reaction is instantaneous. This is after approximately 1 minute, the anode catches the first rust particles. Seems a very efficient way of removing rust.



After 3 Minutes it gets nasty. I say nasty because this looks like a disgusting soup. The reason is that quite a while ago I put some WD40 in the tank in order to stop the rust eating up my tank

Seat fitting

Progressing slowly but steadily...

 The U Frame fits nicely on the cutted ends of the original frame giving lots of possibilities for welding.

The backend looks currently pretty short but will of course be longer once the rear fender with tail light and blinkers installed.

Quite happy with the progress so far

I also started re-assembling the engine and replacing all gaskets except the upper cylinder and engine block gaskets.

Clean Engine

More than 30 years of accumulated dirt have been removed using different techniques.  Starting with dirt removers based on strong chemicals, numerous "Dremel" hours where the aluminium shell of the engine has been polished, and followed by another session with acetone to remove any remaining fine dust and grease, I finally started to cover the engine with aluminium primer and then painted it grey metallic with a touch of bronze and finally clear coated. Looks now literally brand-new, just awesome..

Point of no return

Now it's done, no going back anymore,  frame has been cut and grinded

More planning & confusion

Another week has passed and lots of things mostly unrelated to my built have happened. My brandnew TIG welding machine has arrived. Also a beautiful seat that perfectly fits the CX500 has arrived.
Now, what I like a lot about the seat is the color, the length and fact that it is very narrow. Honestly, It is more of a scrambler style seat. A test fit got this:

I like the looks of it, but then I test fitted the seat with the C - type Fuel tank, and he result was this:

Now, I am confused since I love both cafe races and scramblers alike, 

Scramblers have a cool and upright relaxing sitting position, large handlebars. Also the "C" type tank and seat come perfectly together, but... this isn't by any means a Café Racer style bike anymore, this is clearly a Scrambler....

Powerplant

Finally the CX500 engine removal...
With the help of some hydraulic tools, the engine removal was fairly simple.
Looking forward to remove 34 years of dirt...

Oh, yes.. and btw.. I got a set of polished valve and a clutch cover dirt cheap from ebay, so I don't need to bother about those

Bare Metal

Here we go, the tank in bare metal. One can recognise already the shape of the future café racer..

In the 2nd picture you can see a coupe of dents that need to be removed during the next days, and then quickly cover the bare metal with primer before rust starts.

Fuel Tank

I like the fuel tanks's red metallic color, but a closer look reveals a couple of dents and lots of small scratches.

I have to repaint it anyway, so I started removing the original paint. Strong chemicals are my friend.

I use a small sheet of plastic to cover the prepared surface so that the chemicals don't evaporate too quickly. After half an hour, the paint peels of quite easily except at the edges where the upper and lower tank halves are welded together

I have a second CX500 tank in my garage from a "C"model. I like the bad-ass look and the way it accentuates the V2 engine. However, since I'm building a Café Racer style bike I prefer to go with the original tank.

Here a few pictures of the "C" Model Tank:

Planning

First thing in the planning is to get the bike's stance right. Cafe Racer and scrambler style bikes tend to have a very horizontal line. The CX's front is high and the back-end is pretty low. I lowered the front about 3,5 cm by sliding the fork up. This improves the stance quite a lot and allows me to mount the clip-on bars on top of the upper triple tree clamp. Now I need to stiffen the fork a bit. Designed for comfort the bike tends to plunge which I recon is most probably not compatible with reduced travel. Stiffer springs and a bit more (25ml) fork oil will do it.

Modifying the placement of the fuel tank helps to get the Café Racer typical horizontal line. The front of the Fuel tank will be placed bout 1,5 cm lower thus being closer to the engine while the rear end of the tank needs to be mounted about 2 cm higher. It needs to be in line with the future seat. In the following picture you can see that the back-end of the bike builds much lower than the front-end.

The Frame needs some modifications. I will start cutting the part behind the rear shocks, that parts builds too large and there is no need for it anymore. A U-Shaped frame loop will be welded on the back of the frame, and Since i plan to install rear-set foot-pegs, I need to weld some additional attachment points for the foot pegs and the mechanism to operate the gear changes.

This weekend I will order the billet clip-on bars, rear set foot pegs and the U-shaped bar

Oh, btw.. I decided to keep the original Comstar wheels and NOT go the spoke wheel conversion way. The wheels are in an excellent shape and honestly.. I kind'a like them!

Stripped

Bike almost completely stripped. Next step will be the engine removal.

Tear down

Let's start with the easy part which is removing all the crap that is unnecessary or which will be replaced anyway.
The original exhaust did some resistance, but I won... result, the right exhaust pipe broke, ... however this no loss since the original exhaust had multiple scratches and dents and did not really have a café racer look.
For the bikes age, all is in perfect condition, nothing to complain about.

How it started

The looks of the bike is not everybody's taste. The CX500 was ahead of it's time both technically and design when initially presented in 1978. Water cooled 80 deg V2 shaft driven, tubeless comstar wheels. Some say she was the most ugly looking bike on earth which gave her the nickname "Plastic maggot" or "Güllepumpe" (in Germany).

By coincidence I found her in a barn, covered with straw. This CX500 from 1982 just had 37000 km on the odometer, shaft drive, Honda reliability and the wide availability of parts are an argument for me to use this bike as donor bike in order to convert it to something cool such as a Café Racer, Scrambler or Tracker.

Let's see what comes out the next months...