Yea, I thought that tidbit was too good not to share. The black plastics still look nice and shiny a day later
Today was a win some, lose some day. I was able to get the exhaust installed and the cooling system installed and filled afterwards, and fired up the bike, almost immediately filling the garage with steam, smoke from burning oil and coolant, and plain old exhaust. I turned on a fan and abandoned the garage only to witness a huge cloud of God knows what be blown out of my garage by the fan. Guess I'm the weird neighbor ;D
However, the crossover coolant tube on the front cylinders started leaking coolant almost immediately. The fix was to replace the new o-rings that came with the gasket kit with, er, newer o-rings from my spares. Getting the hold down clip on and off with the carbs on was a bit frustrating, but the o-rings fixed the issue. Then I noticed the oil leak from the front head.
I had to repair the corner of the front head with some JB Weld due to a broken off piece I didn't notice when I received the head from the Ebay fairies. Yea, I knew it was half assed, and it didn't hold.
I have a couple of choices now. First one is to take the original head with the broken off exhaust stud to a machine shop to have them attempt to remove what's left and install a new stud. Second option is to find another new head on Ebay. Either option costs me an additional $30 for another head gasket, crap. Not to mention replacing the front head on the bike, which just sounds delightful. Ah well, I should have dealt with this when I noticed the head was broken.
On top of that, the replacement fan switch is dead out of the box. Infinite resistance, and the resistance doesn't go down at all with heat. The bike got pretty warm before I manually enabled the fan, which then rubbed against the new spark plug wires. This has been a trying day in Interceptor land :
A new fan switch should be at my local auto parts store tomorrow.
And, like the maraschino cherry of Honda related suffering on top of it all, I found more issues with the charging system on my 1979 CB650. I pulled the alternator cover off to investigate the charging issues, and found that the plastic part of the charging rotor had broken into shrapnel, taking out the charging rotor brushes and making the inside of the case look like a grenade had gone off inside. More money to Ebay for new to me parts.
At least that newly recovered seat looks good...