Intermezzo

Not entirely unlike a café racer

Well the CBX is gone, and the the Z250 has progressed a little more. I'm quite pleased with the way it looks, so I've gratuitously added yet another picture of it prior to dismantling it in order to finish off trimming the old brackets which we didn't want from the frame and welding the new ones that we did want to the frame. I seem to recall shoving the thing outside and taking some pictures of it on the side stand, but I don't seem to be able to find them, possibly because I imagined the entire episode.

Johnny making it look pretty.

In between rushing around and panicking about all the usual things that I have, or more accurately, choose, to rush around and panic about after the first picture was taken Johnny and I jointly and severally managed to get all the outstanding random bits done and start taking the thing to pieces. Johnny got on with finessing the shape of the body work to ready it for a coat of primer, and I took things off until it reached the stage where the engine needed removing.



"I'm just having a lie down..."



 As is occasionally the case, this proved to be a little less than entirely straight forward, with the two rear engine mounting studs seized into their rubber bushings. Quite why Kawasaki felt the need to rubber mount the bloody thing in the first place is a bit of a mystery, and it's entirely possible that when it's all re-assembled, the engine will be solidly mounted. In order to remove the rear lower engine mounting stud, we laid the motorcycle on its side to facilitate accessing the stud in question with the air hacksaw. An air hacksaw, is a hacksaw powered by compressed air, and not in any way similar to an air guitar just in case you were wondering...

There are easier ways.

With the mounts sawn through and the engine removed from the frame, a few minutes twirling of spanners had the wheels and forks removed too, and shortly afterwards the swinging arm had parted company with the frame too. As I'd decided to brush paint the frame on the Z250, I elected to prepare it by hand rather than having it blasted. While this is a fairly low cost option, it's tedious and time consuming, and has little to recommend it. Possibly the only major benefit over blasting is that as long as you're brush painting the frame, you can't remove paint from any areas that you can't reach to repaint. My point is that hand preparing and brush painting a frame is a possibility, and in fact used to be standard practice, and if you're strapped for cash, may prove to be a viable option. The paint we've got for the frame is a "machinery enamel" which is basically commercially available paint that's suitable for brushing as well as spraying, but can be mixed to match a wide range of colours. What that means is that we could order one type of paint for brush painting the frame, and a second type for painting the bodywork, but have both types of paint supplied in the same colour.

I'm hoping to get the first coat of primer on the frame in the next day or so, and I'll let you know how it goes.