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How damaged is too damaged?

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Otis:
Absolutely brilliant and thank you for sharing. David Silver spares are in my opinion far too expensive so much better to do what you have done. I completely agree that tools, even if only used once, are an investment.

Spitfire:
Great result, pretty sure that I have some points covers lurking in the loft maybe I will give it a go.

Cheers

Dennis

Oddjob:
Quite right Otis. One day we'll all pass on, my lad will inherit all my tools. If he gets a use out of them, great. If not then he can sell them or pass them on when he passes.

There are some on this forum who seem to resent me posting stuff like this, they seem to think I'm sort of saying how clever am I? Nothing is further from the truth, it's an attempt to encourage more to do what I do. Experiment, see what works what doesn't.

I've done some stuff I'm immensely proud of, stuff I think is just ok but seems to get raved about for some reason. I'm good at polishing, I'll admit to that. Was I when I started, not in the least. It took time and more importantly the right tools to get the best results.

Here's the petrol cap I mentioned. Now most people don't know the internals can be removed with no damage, you can even dismantle the inner part, the part with the rubber seal which seals the tank, it's vented as well so dismantling it can check all is well inside there. It's not hard but does mean a little expense to replace the rivet holding it together. Removing it allows it to be rechromed and more importantly you can clean up all the rust that is present in every cap I've ever seen. I did of a How-To for the American site on dismantling the inner part, I still have all the pics.

Ok, so started with this, major corrosion damage, the tank it was attached to sat outside on a garden bench for 4 years or more. This is the result.

 

The underside was better but still rusty. You can see where I'd started to clean it up on the right hand side before I remembered to take a pic.



And after chroming.

Oddjob:
Now this one I'm very proud of. I have a good mate on the forum called Roo (don't tell him, he'll get all bigheaded) he has a CB550F he's restoring. He'd had the casings polished by a local company and TBH they didn't come back great, very poor in fact. I did him some fork sliders, they were so good he went back to the polishers and shamed them into redoing his casings, they were claiming it wasn't possible with Jap alloy but had to admit they were wrong after he showed them the sliders. So I wanted to do some 550 casings for him as his were still pretty poor. I did the rotor cover first, I may do a post on that in the future. I had a lot of 550F parts lying around, about 5 clutch casings amongst others. So I decided I'd randomly select one, not try and pick out the best, just put my hand in the box and see what came out. Not the best decision I've ever made TBH.

This is what I started with.



Doesn't look that bad at first glance but boy was I wrong. That corrosion on the upper left is bad, if you ever see that type, run.

Close up. Doesn't look bad, looks like discoloured lacquer. Or it did to me. Soon clean that off I reckoned. Oh dear, my comeuppance was on the way.



There were lots of damage to the casing as well. The kickstart area looked to have been chewed up by using a bolt too long for the kickstart, as it rotated it just gouged big marks in the surrounding area.





So started to clean the casing up. Underneath all that rash was this.



Doesn't look that bad? Look close up.



Those are really deep holes, luckily the clutch cover is made of quite thick alloy and it's main job is just to keep the oil in, it's not really structural so you remove quite a bit before it becomes a problem. Got to admit cleaning this up took me a few months.

And finally we get this. Before I started to polish it.



A close up of the rash area, not 100% perfect but the polishing should remove those little imperfections present.



I'll do the final result in another post as there is a limit of 10 pics per post.

Oddjob:
And finally the end result. I gave this casing to Roo free of charge, I'd fitted all new orings and seals. The only thing it needed was for the lifter mechanism to be zinc plated and Roo can do that as he has all the kit.

You may need sunglasses for the next few pics. Just saying  :) :)









And finally the damaged area around the kickstart. Totally gone.



So he has a clutch cover and a rotor cover, next up a sprocket cover.

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