Rarely do I achieve in a day all that I plan to do. It just never goes as planned. Yesterday it did, and I had a great day.
I cleaned the powder coat out of the rear axle mount, and finished the final drive, wheel, brake and torque arm.
I was missing the axle clamp bolt but reached into my box of bolts and found a flange bolt M8x35, cut it down to 32mm as per specs.
Stood back, looked, and I was happy.
Now to finish some unfinished business with the engine.
First, I had put some non OEM head gaskets that came in an Athena kit. Although it has been said that they are forever needing re-torque, I can't give an opinion. What was more worrying was that I had used RTV black sealant on them, after reading in the FSM "coat surfaces with liquid sealer"...RTV was sort of liquid (more like thixotropic). Who knows, it may have worked, but I was concerned that the sealant may have gone into water passages and may cause problems for me.
So since I had to change them, I got myself some OEM gaskets, and some copper spray.
But instead of whacking the head with a mallet, I used the rope trick (thank you CX500 forum members) .
I also took the opportunity to clean the tappets to remove mushrooms and swapped the rocker shafts (as suggested by cxman on an early post.
Reset the valve clearances using Murray's quick set tool. Great aid.
One of the water pipe elbow mounts needed to be re-threaded after having to drill out a frozen bolt.
An M6 thread former placed.
Engine pretty much finished. I'll refit the starter, then a wash and some detailing.
And that was a good Sunday.