1989 FJ1200: to Hell and back.....

[great white]

Great white,
Yamaha makes a product called Ring-Free (intended for their outboard motors).

Thanks for the recommendation.  Might dig out my boroscope and have a look too. Only problem is my boroscope has a cracked lens, so the image you see is pretty marginal at the best of times.

Great white,

Amazon has lots of borescopes, waterproof fiber optics with dimmable LED lights.  This is a (selectable)1280 pixel version, focal length 3~10 cm.  Amazon has many more, from US$10 and up.  This one is US$21 with a five meter cable, and free shipping if your Amazon order is over $25.  You can cut costs by using a laptop, tablet, or cellphone as the display screen, or the more expensive versions will have a dedicated display screen.  You may want one that is auto-focus/re-focus/manual focus.  Check that they will work with your display device; some are not Apple-friendly.

https://www.amazon.com/Seesi-Endoscope-Waterproof-Inspection-Semi-Rigid/dp/B07PBF6DX5/

My boroscope is purely optical. Ziess optics. Used to use it to scope axial compressors and turbines. I really ahould see if I can order a new lens for it. I don't use it often anymore, but when I do use it it's a great tool.

Correction on last: its an olympus fibrescope. You don't want to know what it cost new (several tunes more than my fj is worth)...

[fj1289]

Personally - with riding season coming up, I'd put it on the road and ride the hell out of it! 

Then, next winter do a rebuild/upgrades.  Go cheap and go for a 1219 kit (bores in the stock liners) - or maybe one of the 1250 kits using Yamaha pistons Robert at RPM has put together.  Have a good valve job done, replace the valve seals, and have fun!  Or go a bit bigger with a 1297 "drop in" kit, or open up the cases for 1314 or 1350, XJR rods, add a little head work (JMR on here comes to mind) and maybe mild cams (that can retain shim over bucket)  to the valve job ... lots of fun and very little if any loss in reliability or added maintenance!

[great white]

Frame is out for powdercoat atm, so no real work on the fj right now.

Currently wrenching on another project that rolled in the door a while ago:





Thats an old 1982 cb650sc I've had hanging around forever. Starting to do some work to it.

[Millietant]

That has the potential to be gorgeous. I'ma huge CB650 fan, having owned one for many years and put 60,000 trouble free miles on it.

Once I got my first FJ in 1986, I kept it so that my parents could go on it and join me on rides any time they wanted - that didn't work out as planned because they'd usually get up much earlier than me, Leave me a note telling me where to meet them at lunch time.......... And take my new FJ, leaving the old 650 for me 

It then got loaned out to a couple of friends who couldn't afford their own bikes but were desperate to get back into riding and touring - that 650 was ridden all over Europe many times in the company of my FJ (the most memorable journey was by road through East Germany (along the "Transit Route" to Berlin, before the wall came down).

I eventually sold it a few years later to a work colleague when it had 83,000 miles on it (with no engine work at all) and then lost track of it.

Great memories.........I'll dig out some old photos !

[Bones]

What's the go with the rear wheel, looks like it's off a shaft drive bike. How are you going to convert it to chain drive?

[great white]

What's the go with the rear wheel, looks like it's off a shaft drive bike. How are you going to convert it to chain drive?

Rear wheel is there just as a placeholder. I have a matching r6 rear wheel on the way. That wheel is from a zx7 and is a project for a rear wheel for my vmax engined yamaha ventilure.

[great white]

That has the potential to be gorgeous. I'ma huge CB650 fan, having owned one for many years and put 60,000 trouble free miles on it.

Once I got my first FJ in 1986, I kept it so that my parents could go on it and join me on rides any time they wanted - that didn't work out as planned because they'd usually get up much earlier than me, Leave me a note telling me where to meet them at lunch time.......... And take my new FJ, leaving the old 650 for me  

It then got loaned out to a couple of friends who couldn't afford their own bikes but were desperate to get back into riding and touring - that 650 was ridden all over Europe many times in the company of my FJ (the most memorable journey was by road through East Germany (along the "Transit Route" to Berlin, before the wall came down).

I eventually sold it a few years later to a work colleague when it had 83,000 miles on it (with no engine work at all) and then lost track of it.

Great memories.........I'll dig out some old photos !

I've owned this one since 91. But, its an odd story.

A fee weeks ago I got a text from my ex wife (who doesn't love getting texts from ex wives?) to cone and get my old bike of she was going to have it hauled away for scrap. Now, we broke up close to 20 years ago and I assumed she had gotten rid of it long ago, either by dumping it or (as was her tendency back then) burning it in the back yard. Turns out she had pushed it out of the shed and left it outside under the pine trees for pretty much 20 years.

When I went to pick it up (while she was at work) it was a mess. Literally everything was seized solid except the wheel and steering bearings. Faded, corroded covered in pine sap and even big blobs of white latex paint (they had painted the shed a couple times and obviously didn't give a rats behind about the bike).

Looked like this:





Got it home and tore into it. Carbs were junk and it took a couple days in the ultrasonic to get them clean again. Tank is a rusted mess, so that will have to be stripped and coated. The engine, surprisingly, turned over with a strap when on the rotor. I thought for sure the rings would have rusted to a cylinder or two.

From there it turned into a project to resurrect the old hack and thats where it sits today. Not sure if I'll keep it or sell it on, but I feel like I just wouldn't be doing the right thing by junking it. Gave myself a $500 budget and I'm almost out, but I've got most of what I need to finish between left over parts lying around and used parts off ebay and the like.

[Millietant]

Looking forward to the progress reports.

As mentioned, here are a couple of "mouldy" old photo's of my CB 650 Z (we got this as well as the SC, I think the other model you got before the SC, came with wire wheels and a single disc brake).

These were from a tour in 1982 with my kid brother on pillion when he was 9 (in Switzerland and the Black Forest)