Phour days to phantastic - a Honda CX500 tale (day 3)

As the casual observer will not, it might have (already) been a tad longer than 4 days, but I never said, those four days would happen in direct succession. 😉

We left this story off with the need for a new second carb-body, as the first one was ruined (by me).

Turns out, that I also needed a new o-ring on the link-tube and some other bits, so another carb overhaul kit, a float chamber gasket and two needle valves were ordered.

Now there's a mighty good reason, why nobody wants to do needle valves on one of these. They are are an absolute bastard to get out and only some really nasty tricks persuaded them from leaving their place. Including literally raging hell on them with a hot-air gun and driving a woodscrew down the first seat.

The amount of crud behind the seat (even though it was freshly cleaned in an ultra-sonic cleaner), was incredible.

At this point I had thought, I had seen the worst. The second one mandated even more drastic measures in the form of drilling and properly tapping it to M6.

I figured, that the only way to get the new needle valve in without damage would be to freeze it as cold as I could and heat the carb body as much as I could.

Let me just put this here once and for all: I totally get, why people convert to two individual carbs. The installation of the stock carbs has definitely left a mark (on my fingers).

From there onwards, it was almost anti-climactic: hook up an auxiliary tank, fire her up and sync the carbs.

Last but not least with Winter lurking round the corner, the water was drained and the radiator filled up with a water-coolant mix.

So what's still up to do for the fourth day? Bit of wiring is probably the most important bit. It still needs the headlight to be wired up, so not only the pilot-light is working and working indicators front and back would be nice. (Currently none work.) Ah yes and the forks are bent to buggery, so we'll have to find a position where the frontwheel and bars roughly point in the same direction, but this almost counts as a vanity-mod. 😁 And then she'll be off for her roadworthyness-inspection in Spring.