Step 2: Hanging the pipes

Tonight the girls and I decided to get started.

Let me just start out by saying that this bike has the most unusual exhaust plumbing I've ever seen. We spent at least 15 minutes just trying to decide which pipe went where and the assembly order of the exhaust clamps (I'm still not sure it's right).

The mufflers are quite rusted out (you can see the red remains of the lower muffler in a pile near the rear wheel) so my original plan was to remove them for now and replace them with baffles. However now that I've actually spent some time with them I find out that one is clamped on, the other welded. So, I won't be making any changes here until I get out the angle grinder...

With a little help we were able to figure it out though and I even had enough time afterward to do an oil change (maybe for the first time in the last 15 years?). With some fresh lube in the case I felt more comfortable turning over the engine and I was able to do so without any unusual noises.

I also picked up a few feet of fuel line today. The next task will be to re-attach the carburetors (I inspected them today and they look surprisingly good) and hook them up to an external fuel supply (I have other plans for the actual gas tank, but I'll leave that for another post) so we can move closer to that first attempt at firing up the beast.

...now I need to go googling to make sure I clamped the headers on correctly...