Re: Black and Gold Cafe - 71 CB350 - Exhaust work
Well the weekend wasn't entirely un-productive. I was in Northern MI with my girlfriend visiting her family, and her dad's hobby is building circle track race cars, muscle cars, and a host of other high-horsepower projects. I don't have a bandsaw, so while I was there we used his bandsaw to make a 2 into 1 collector for my new exhaust. Using the bandsaw made it quite a bit easier to do the long cuts to make the collector merge, instead of trying to do those with my hand grinder. I still ended up making the cuts a little off, so the collector is a little shallower than the 15 degrees I originally planned. We fixed this by putting the welded piece on the flat sander to get the inlets straight which worked well. Forgot to take a pic of that though.
Started by making these templates for cut angles, and also the outline of the final collector.
Then made my 15deg cuts with some straight attached
Then the long cut for the merge
and welded! I must've not cleaned the metal very well, because there were a few spots that turned out really porous (or my TIG skills are just rusty). I'll have to grind those out and re-weld, and also smooth out the inside of the welds.
Also, Thursday last week I whipped up a temporary fix for my oil spitting problem, an extremely light, cheap, and compact aluminum catch can!!
It actually fits inside the hole between the engine, cam tensioner, frame, and carb bowls/overflow drains perfectly. The black tube runs into the back of the can from the head breather, and then the clear tube sits just inside and loops down to drain under the bike. The clear lets met see when the can fills up and starts to spit oil again, and the black silicone seals it all up. Cheap, easy, and works great so far. Rode it to work on friday and had 0 oil on my rear wheel or pants.
I also borrowed a compression tester from a friend at work, so I'll use that soon and see how my compression is. I'm thinking if I've got good compression, then the rings must be good and the spitting is probably due to old valve guides. If the compression is low it must be the rings. Either way it's gonna get freshened up this winter. I've decided against a full high-power build. For the 3-4000 I'd spend on making 45-ish hp I can buy something much newer and more powerful, so it'll just get rings, hone, cam chain/slipper, valve guides, a good cleaning, and anything else I find while inside.
More soon!