It’s been a while since I told you about my Indian Scout 741 restoration, so I thought a general update, on the process & where we are, would be nice!
In short, summer was too hot to work! But this gave me time to sort out a few things quietly. So not all is bad!
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You can check the main page for my Indian Scout adventure to get clarity on where my dad and I stand!
As mentioned previously, my bike is at the moment in a 1000 pieces. Completely dismantled! When I wrote this I thought it was completely dismantled but actually, we managed to take even more pieces apart!
Like the kick starter. Parts forming the kick were still attached together. It’s not the case anymore! Same with the handlebar. We had not removed the control grips and now we have! Same with the wheels, etc. etc.
It’s a bit scary really!
On some of the specific items, I told you about before, here is below a quick update:
Engine overhaul
We are a bit stuck with the valves. I haven’t received them yet and summer being summer & France being France, there was no way to get the valves seats done anyway. I hope this get sorted soon… we are very eager to start putting everything back together! (update: it got sorted in a major way!)
Because of my back and forth, it’s unfortunately going to take more time than I hoped.
We had a lot of discussions about the piston oil retaining rings. At the end, we concluded that we will keep the ones we have, at least for now. Apparently the pistons are not original so neither are the rings and it makes it logistically complicated to change. It seems that the worst case scenario, at this point, is that the engine smokes if these are not fitted. Hopefully just a little! Will see. (update: the rings were changed and the engine redone!)
Gearbox overhaul
My brother has finished repairing the Christmas tree and it looks amazing! We have just barely started fiddling with it and next I’m with my dad, we will put the gearbox back together. Finally, something that we can assemble back!!
To be honest, I’m pretty sure my dad will have already done it, when I arrive there. I’ll be slightly annoyed and will take it all back apart, no doubt. I have to know how to do it myself! That’s one of the main goal of this restoration & I think he forgets it sometimes.
The second reason I’ll be slightly annoyed with him is because I’m pretty sure he will have messed up all my cleaning!
I talked about how I cleaned up the aluminum parts like the clutch cover before. At that point, I still needed to work on the gearbox and… I did!! And OMG! It shines so much!
I found in a cupboard, a bottle of Miror cleaner and thought to myself: “this is probably almost as old as the bike, maybe it will be good?” so I tried and as anticipated it worked wonders! Miror cleaner has been around for decades in France and apparently it never goes bad!
My Dremel worked wonders too. I used the felt polishing disks to really work the Miror cleaning product in.
I really have to do the same to the crankcase now!
You know the worst part? No one will ever be able to notice because the gearbox is well hidden, behind the clutch on one side and the chain guard and exhaust and the other side! I’m still happy, ok! Until I see my dad’s greasy finger prints all over it of course 😉
Update: a lot more was done to the gearbox! It’s all so funny to read this piece and remember how far we were.
Paint job
Sometimes it feels like it is taking forever to paint this bike (update: it does!) and I wonder what I’m doing wrong. But then I remind myself that I can only do a few parts at a time and only once a month. So, it really isn’t that bad.
In addition, I had to change my work set up and no longer have a dust free space to let the freshly painted parts dry. I now have to let them dry where I paint, which is a time consuming nuisance. But it’s like that.
Finally, I didn’t paint all summer, apart from one pretty disastrous trial. We had 2 big heatwaves and summer was generally so hot. I even got really scared that all my products would turn bad with the heat, but none of the cans exploded, so that’s good news!
So in short, the paint isn’t finished although lots of parts are now 100% ready. Some require small touch-up, others are still a work in progress.
In particular, the front fender is giving me headaches! I still haven’t finished the mastic work. On the picture below, you can see the very poorly applied thin mastic layer. This shall be the last coat. The ‘heavy duty’ mastic is below. It turns out, mastics isn’t my forte. But to be fair, the shape of the fender makes it very difficult to apply and it was majorly damaged in some areas. So, there is a lot more sanding ahead & I’m a little stressed about the end result.
I have to get better at this because I might need to do some mastic work on the tanks. I’m still pondering on this (update, I’ve done it!).
On the bright side, my brother confirmed that my paint job is hecking good! You see, I had painted the flat metal rod that holds the cylinder heads together, with regular black paint. I later realized my mistake: it gets pretty hot around the cylinder heads & regular paint can’t handle that heat. I therefore asked my brother to get this flat rod sanded again so I could apply heat resistant paint. He confirmed my paint did not come easily, not easily at all! Me happy!!
Chromes!!
Well, I’ll try to make it a short story… but getting chromes done was a long winding road.
There aren’t many companies doing chromes anymore. At least in France. And from what people were telling me, prices & delays had become outrageous.
After searching for quite a while and after a lot of dead-ends and numerous ridiculous advises, I got desperate and decided to try doing nickel plating myself!
Yep, I’m a bit crazy! You knew this already.
For my first test, I followed the instructions from this youTube video. I took some small parts to test my installation and… it actually turned out really well!
At that point, I had no clue how I could manage bigger pieces but I thought I would find out along the way.
Fortunately, the same week-end I was experimenting with nickel plating, a friend of a friend of a friend recommended me a company in the Paris region that still does chromes and is used to work for individuals, on renovation projects.
A few days later, I got a second recommendation for the same company! After months of searching!
This convinced me, I had to give up the nickel plating idea! Thank god, because it would have taken me ages to handle it all.
It took a few back and forth emails and phone calls, loads of pictures, some final dismantling and a trip to Paris to drop of the parts!
I can’t yet tell you how things went, as I will get my shiny chromes in 2 weeks or so! I’m fairly confident this will be good & I can’t wait to show you! (Update: Oh god yes they look good!)
The exhaust and a couple other bits will be for a next trip.
A least, that’s a huge headache solved.
Lessons learned
Not sure how many lessons I can learn from this renovation project? Surely patience has been the most challenging one.
When we started this whole thing, I thought I would be ridding by summer. Then I realized that fall may be optimistic… now I’m just hoping it will be by next summer!
It’s rather scary to see all the parts around. The more time it takes, the scarier. Every now and then, we pull something out of the box and wonder where it goes? For most of parts we kind of know, so it’s all going to be ok!!
The other thing I keep on re-learning is that you can never take enough pictures! No matter how many I take, a lot of times, when looking for something specific, I don’t have the right angle. It’s highly annoying!
Lastly, I had not realized how much the summer heat would affect our work. As mentioned above, no paint, no mastic… and even polishing was particularly tiring. Can’t get anything done from 3rd parties, can’t get parts…
We have another bike to restore after this one and we’re going to have to plan things much better!
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