With a fresh, full tank of propane for the heater and finding myself stuck in Ohio for the duration I've finally started to get back into this thing. It has amazed me as I slowly work my way, piece by piece, through the various bits of this machine. Most everything is so incredibly filthy with some light rust but when I scrub and scrub and then scrub some more it's slowly coming around and most parts are beginning to look like ones that have come off a bike with 42k miles.
I removed the mufflers and managed to get some shine into them. At the moment they're pretty nice looking and will require only a little more attention to be very nice. There is one OEM and one aftermarket so I'm hoping they are mates for the one OEM and one aftermarket mufflers that
@Hurco550 has on his airhead. With any luck he'll end up with a couple of matched sets. I'll put on the SS set I picked up down in Lithopolis.
It might have been humorous to have fired this old girl up without taking the mufflers off; all this mess came out of them. Anyone standing behind would have been blasted!
Levi turned me on to a YouTube vid from a guy pushing Marvel Mystery Oil as an aluminum cleaner for motorcycle aluminum. I figured I wouldn't be out much to give it a try so I picked up a bottle. I tried it on some of the engine aluminum bits and it did OK, not great, probably about the same as glass cooktop cleaner and aluminum foil. I'm thinking about vapor hone, but I'd end up leaving part of the engine/transmission as-is and do just the basic removable parts. It doesn't seem like a great idea to completely disassemble such a low mile engine/trans. Here's a cleaned air cleaner cover half next to the uncleaned engine/trans. Better but not fantastic in my opinion. However the thing
IS 50 years old so...
Today I pulled off the rest of the exhaust system and spread the MMO and let it sit for a while then started scrubbing. Though the next pix is poor quality it's an example of what some of the better parts of the head pipes looked like.
And at the moment they look like this, though they are now liberally coated w/ MMO for the night and we'll see if what's left comes off more easily tomorrow.
And the rest of the exhaust parts are soaking in acetone for the night. Those clamps and brackets were directly below where the carbs were dripping the collected 30+ year old gasoline goo.
The next task will be replacing the top end gaskets and seals.