After the restoration: 9600-mile service [page 4]
Monday, Jan 24, 2005
Today I'm going to start work on the front end of the bike. The bike has a slight front end shimmy at about 35-40 MPH. Nothing dangerous, but annoying. I checked the back end of the bike -- swing arm and rear wheel bearings -- a month or so ago. This time I'll check the front.
I use this wooden fixture to support the bike when jacking it up to
get the front wheel off the ground. The side stand is slightly in
the way, so I support the bike by the bottom of the engine at the
oil pan mounting flange, not the oil pan.
This time I remembered to detach the front brake cable before removing the
front wheel. Once the wheel was off the bike I put some jack stands under
the front swing arm. This is more stable than the bottle jack. Also, the
bottle jack looses pressure over time.
I've an old rear axle which is combined with a length of pipe to form
my wheel bearing maintenance tool. The pipe goes over the end of the axle
to keep the bearing stack aligned. A few hits with a dead blow hammer and
the stack is out, reading for cleaning and checking. Of course the
bearing retaining nut is first removed.
All of the parts of the stack are removed, cleaned, inspected, lightly
oiled, then re-assembled to check the bearing pre-load. The bearings
are fine. The pre-load was a slight touch too tight. Adding a shim would
make it too loose. I gave the outer spacer a few figure eights on some 600
grit paper and tried again. Perfect.
The stack was well greased then placed back in the hub with the help
of a dead blow mallet. I like it when I see that seating the stack in the
hub forces a bit of grease out of the top bearing. It means I used enough!
The spring, hub cap, thrust bushing, and bearing retainer are installed
and the wheel is just about done.
I checked the tire air pressure. It was down about 2 lbs. I brought it
up to 28 PSI. Then I put the tire on the balancer. The weights needed
to move a bit. After balancing I removed my greasy finger prints with the
help of some Mothers wheel polish. The wheel is ready to go back on the
bike. But first...