Blog Takeover....

This is Daz here, I finally thought it was about time that there was something on this blog for the husbands, so here goes.

It was late February 2008 and I had a bike that needed a freshen up in the motor department, so why not freshen up the rest of the bike at the same time? This is how the bike looked before it went in for a make over.

And so the strip down begun, who would've thought that this would be the start of 8 long months? That is correct, from initial strip down to final assembly and coming out the other end looking and sounding 100% better it was 8 months.



After the bike was stripped of its parts I then started attacking it with a stripping disc on all the accessible parts of the frame, when this was completed it was taken down to the sodium blasting dude in redruth (payment for the sodium blasting was made in the way of 24 pack), it had to be blasted around all the welds, nooks and crannies where I couldn't get in with the strip disc. When I got the frame back I then had to sand the whole frame to smooth out the profile that the blasting left, all up I probably spent about 16 hours stripping and sanding.



So now it's time for painting. First the frame had a couple of coats of undercoat then countless coats of a two pack paint which Stu at Resene matched for me off a brand new 2008 KDX at Motorcycle World, thanks Stu. I figured that if I was going to all the trouble of stripping and painting the frame I might as well give it a coat of the latest colour (so now I have a silver KDX which looks much smarter than the old green model). But it didn't stop there, since changing the frame colour I also had to change the colour of the tank, this was hand sanded to give the paint something to etch to, this also had a couple of coats of undercoat and then 3 or 4 coats of a 2 pack gloss black, this now ties in with the frame. When spraying the frame I used a state of the art spraying jig!! (It's amazing how many uses you can get out of a common broom and wheelie bin) The rear swing arm got stripped right back and had a couple of grooves welded up by the good lads at Andar and then sanded and sprayed in the same silver as the rest of the frame.




Now that the frame is looking good as new it's time to start assembly, or as much assembly as I could do without the motor. This is how the bike spent the next few months while I had a friend rebuild the motor which included the following: new conrod, piston, rings, every bearing in the motor, gasket sets and I also had to get the bore re-chromed (not a cheap rebuild but had to be done)





The rest of the bike had the following replaced: new gripper seat cover, new alloy bash guard for the rear brake master cylinder, new headstock bearings top and bottom, new bearings in all suspension joints/pivots, new front pads, new air filter, new alloy gear lever, new fork gators and I've also added an hour meter to keep up with maintenance based on hours running.

My KDX is now re-born, a project that took 8 months but was worth the wait.



Tune in for the next instalment soon... Daz.