Since the last update I’ve sold the Black EX3 to Doc Erwin for 26k + an old S90 engine he bought recently. There’s a lot of feels about my selling that bike but I won’t get into that now, I might write about that when he picks it up this week. I picked up the donor engine and brought it my mechanic Feds. A few days ago he opened up the engine and sent me pics and here they are.
Notice the welding done where the bearing is supposed to be.
The welding part apparently came off but he said that the welding is at a spot where it’s supposed to keep the main bearing in place. So if you put a bearing there it will just fall off since nothing will stop it. This is bad but he’s not yet sure it might be able to get fixed.
Now here are the pics of the donor engine.
It’s in pretty rough shape as the case on the stator side was open drying out the insides and letting moisture in. However we can salvage this part in red which he says he needs.
If he cannot fix the welding issue that means we have to salvage the crankcase from the donor too which would mean the engine number won’t match in the Certificate or Registration anymore. I can’t have that as a big part of my buying this bike was the matching numbers so that sucks.
But anyway while that’s going on I can get going on the rest of the bike, meaning sandblasting and painting. For painting I have a couple of options:
- Sandblast and powdercoat at Republic Powdercoat – Fast and easy but the paint will be their standard red which is nice but not genuine.
- Sandblast and professionally painted where I got Leslie done – Will take 2 weeks to a month depending on how busy that shop is and I’ll get professionally painted metallic red.
However as per this post ‘The pre-68 models had only non-metallic colors; but after March 1968, they were made with candy colors.’
Even though mine is a ’69 model (but CR earliest date was ’74) I want to restore it to pre-68 because the donor bike I bought had pre-68 signal lights.
They are much nicer than the standard looking round signal lights and I managed to find front ones from a guy selling them on FB. Also post 68 models had chrome fenders which honestly I don’t like as I prefer the silver painted ones.
So I guess I’ll go with Candy Red which I can get with powdercoating.
As for style, there’s Option 1, the original idea here:
Then there’s Option 2
And just yesterday, I saw a variation of that here which I’ll call Option 2A:
So I’m thinking I’ll go with Option 1 first for at least a year to a couple of years then go with the others if I feel like it after that. They are so cool but I guess the right thing to do is to try it out stock first.
So either today or tomorrow I can pick up the parts for sandblast + painting, and purchase these parts I’ve sourced.
- set ignition lock, fork lock & gas cap
- headcase + headlight + speedo
- air filter box with filter
- orig switches
- orig grips
- air filter emblem
- gas tank emblem
- signal lights (mentioned above)
The guy said he has them all but he’s a little difficult to talk to I wish he’d just list them down like a shopping cart and I will just tick off the ones I need. Fortunately he lives nearby I’ll visit him soon and grab as much as I can.
That’s it for now. Exciting week ahead!