Time for another Ryca build thread. I've read through a lot of them already to try and prepare myself for what's ahead.
I picked up a pretty clean 2003 to use as the base. The previous owner had purchased the bike in 2011 with the hopes of getting his motorcycle license and using the bike around town. Well, that never happened and the odometer was only 4 miles higher when I bought it compared to the paperwork that he had from the dealer that he bought it from. I'm at work so I don't remember the exact mileage but it was right around 3100 miles on it when I bought it. The good news is that he kept it very clean, changed the oil, and even upgraded to the raptor petcock.
That was at the end of July. I put about 150-200 miles on the bike since then just because I hadn't ridden in a couple years and I missed it. I also wanted to make sure everything was running fine on the bike. I can confidently say that cruisers are not for me. The seating position is more uncomfortable for me than the sport bike position for sure. A couple times I actually ended up resting my feet on the passenger pegs just to change the position. This didn't really come as a surprise for me because I had taken a couple of my uncles' Harleys for short rides in the past and didn't like it much.
Everyone also talks about the torque and how great is is. My last bike was a Kawasaki ZZR1200 and it had gobs of low end torque and still revved up over 10k rpm so that wasn't a great selling point either. (stock was somewhere around 80ft-lbs. 65 ft-lbs were available as low as 2,800 rpm, peak hp was around 140 at the wheel)
The good news with all of that is that I'm definitely excited about converting to a cafe racer. I think the seating position will actually be moderately comfortable for me even at 6'0" and of course it never hurts that the bike is about to lose some weight.
Yesterday I started on the teardown of the bike to get to tank sent in to Ryca. I think I spent about 4 hours in the garage and ended up working on the actual bike for about 45 minutes. I tried to clean up the work area a bit before starting. Of course after getting everything cleared out I decided that I needed some more light...so the first trip to Lowe's was made. Getting the bike on the lift that I have was a little tricky just because the frame area is so small. I also couldn't find my good tiedowns to keep it on the lift and ended up using some crappy ones that were in my garage for some reason.
Teardown went fairly smoothly so far. I did things a little out of order because I was really curious what the bike sounded like without a muffler. Loud....extremely loud is the answer to that.
The only issue that I ended up running into was that the bike wanted to fall off of the stand after I removed the rear wheel. There was just too much weight hanging off of the front of the lift. I lowered it down so that the front wheel is touching the ground and moved the straps around a little. Hopefully I'll be able to track down my better straps this evening and get things more secure before one of my kids knocks the whole thing over.
(Sorry if the pictures aren't showing up right. Work has photobucket blocked so I'm assuming that the links are typed in correctly)