Winging it

The most recent addition to my stable is a 1984 Goldwing Aspencade that I picked up from a forum member for $500 and some beer. It's pretty ratty, but it ran and drove and has plenty of potential. So far, I've only gotten it home and broken it more in an effort to get it into my garage, but my plan is to refresh it and ride it as it was intended for a couple years before trading up a bit.

Getting the bike home in the first place was a bit sketchy. I caught a bit of the second Snowmageddeon as I came out of Georgia and had a bit of a white-knuckle ride for fifty miles or so of ice. Once home, I had to figure out how to get the bike from the trailer to the garage. My driveway is sloped away from the house at a fairly steep angle, and I couldn't get enough lift on the front of the trailer to make it possible to roll the bike off the back. I parked on the street, rolled the bike off, and attempted to start it, and that's where things started to go wrong. While the bike started right up in the balmy 71 degree Florida weather, my 9 degree Kentucky night proved too much. It came really close to starting after repeated tries, but right when I got to the point where I was starting to think "Gee, I'm probably running the starter too much and need to let it cool for a bit", there was smoke from the brand-new starter. So, I had to strap my winch to my workbench and pull the bike up that way.

I've been making a list of what I need to make this project go, but I don't want to buy too much or do too much yet since I don't really have a transferable title for the bike yet. KY is a notary state, and the Florida title is in the name of (hopefully) the guy that owned it before the guy I bought it from. I'm waiting to get a notarized title transfer form back so I know I won't have to just part it out or try to find another sucker to buy it.

So far, my pick list looks like:

• Fix starter and re-attach (the new starter overheated to the point that it actually cracked the magnets, but I might be able to piece it together with the original starter to make a working one)
• It's spraying coolant from somewhere under the carbs. Looks like a gasket issue or something is disconnected
• The rear end is leaking fluid
• I need to have a new key made from the VIN if that's possible. The current key is so worn that it doesn't really want to turn
• New front brake master cylinder. Thee current one is held together with JB Weld
• Various bits of the front fairing are cracked up and missing and need to be repaired/replaced
• Radio doesn't appear functional. It's a hacked-in aftermarket that I need to do something about
• Torn seats and dried out leather
• Terrible mildew / boat bilge smell in the luggage
• Horn button missing
• Cracks in the instrument panel lens
• Windshield needs to be reattached
• Clock broken
• Missing bits of the side fairings
• Timing belts
• Replace all the fluids
• Lots of polishing
• Mirrors are mismatched and the right one is in bad shape
• Compression and leak-down test on motor to see how that is
• Paint is thrashed (and I hate the color)
• Various electronics not working (probably a result of the radio work)

My first goal -- after getting the title square, of course -- is to just get it to start up and run well without any leaks. Once that's done, I'll be able to take care of all the other bits a little at a time. I'm actually pleasantly surprised at what is actually working on the bike: the digital dash seems to be 100% functional, all of the lighting is working (except for some turn signal flasher issues), and most surprisingly the air suspension works.

Anyway, it's not my first build, but it is my first build thread, so stay tuned.

Oh, and of course I forgot the most important thing. I don't have any really good pics yet, but here it is on the trailer:

A little Simichrome has started to get that front fairing bit above the headlight with the Honda emblem in pretty good shape.

This thing has turned into a pretty nasty albatross around my neck in a hurry. Apparently, despite promises to the contrary, the person that I bought this off of has no intention of ever following through on the paperwork that I need to be able to transfer the title, so this bike will never see the road again. I made a bad assumption about someone, and now I'm pretty much stuck with it. Lesson learned, won't make that mistake again. For future purchases, instead of asking a seller if they have a clean title, the question is do you have a clean title in your name.

In the interest of making some lemonade out of this lemon, however, I have been searching for a title-donor. Since I was already going to need several hundred bucks' worth of parts, I had been considering finding a junked out parts bike as a one-stop-shopping type of deal. What I'm going to do now, then, is use what I already have as a parts-bike and find something that I can title. To that end, I went to Columbus, OH yesterday and picked up a 1987 GL-1200 Interstate with a good title, bad motor, and awful color.

Last night, I got both bikes arranged in the garage along with my wife's car, two other motorcycles, and a Phantom Grip install project for my rallycross Neon. Needless to say, it's a bit crowded in there. My plan is to begin by tearing down the '84 as quickly as possible while documenting the process, so I can make more room to work on the '87. I'm not sure what order I'm going to do things in just yet, but I do plan to pick out the best parts of the body work and give them a fresh coat of paint and get the chrome in better shape so that it will at least look good. I'm also planning on taking the bad motor out of the '87 and rebuilding it so that I've got a nice fresh-ish motor ready to go, just in case. There's also the question of merging together the Aspencade parts with the Interstate. I'm an absolute fool for the digital dash of the Aspencade, so I'd like to bring that over, but we'll see how crazy of a project that becomes. Anyway, on with the teardown:

Seat removed:

Faux tank removed:

That's about as far as I got last night. By the time I cleaned up the garage a bit, got the bikes arranged, the trailer returned to the lot, and the kids in bed I was wiped out, so I plopped in front of the TV for a few minutes, had some beer, then piddled around for an hour or so. My OEM service manual is on-order right now, so I'm kind of groping around in the dark in terms of pulling things off the bike.

More pictures of last night's tear down: 1984 Goldwing Aspencade teardown, day 1

That's a shame to hear about the paper work, I thought us GRMers stuck to our word better than that.

I actually like the red of the title donor you picked up, looks way better than the gold one.

Oh it must be lighting. It's a very horrible orange applied with no masking and extra orange peel with a side of no surface prep. I had several neighbors stop by as I was unloading it to comment that I must be a huge Bengals fan and to give me a ration of E36 M3 over the orangeness of the thing

Good tech here.

http://www.ngwclub.com/forum/index.php?sid=85e6208885e4bed87bd0f3e4cf944c79

Thanks for the link! That looks like a site that I'm going to be spending a lot of time on in the future.

More tear-down progress last night and I started asking some Goldwing people on a different forum for opinion and advice. Interestingly, the manufacture of rebuild parts for these engines has pretty much stopped and supplies of NOS parts are hard to come by. That means that if the motor needs new pistons or rings, I'm pretty much out of luck. The best that I can reliably do would be to buy used pistons with used rings and hope. The good news, though, is that it sounds like the motors tend to be pretty stout and hard to kill, so given the mileage, I might only be a head gasket away from a good motor already installed in the '87.

I did have one interesting thing happen last night, though. As I was taking the '84 apart, I saw just a little hint of a key down on top of the motor. Figuring it must be a spare key for the bike, I dug for a while until I could get it out. Turns out:

Toyota key! At some point, someone was tearing their whole house and everything else apart looking for a car key because it couldn't have just disappeared, and yet it did. So, to whoever lost a key for their Toyota however many years ago: Good news. I found it.

So, its a Toyota Goldwing?

I didn't do anything with the bike last night, however, I did make some more teardown progress on Friday night. While I've heard of the idea of ripping off the bags and bodywork and doing the naked Goldwing thing, I never really understood the attraction. It's not something that I'm going to do -- I want something I can load up and take a trip on, not a muscle bike -- I can totally see the attraction as the bodywork comes off.

I have all the luggage removed, the rear crash bars,the grab bar, and the front fairing is coming apart nicely as well. Later on when I get back to it, I want to finish removing the fairing, the front fender, and the engine crash bars so I can have the bike cut down to size and a !little more manageable for getting the actual mechanicals of the bike pulled off.

In the next couple of days, I should have a new pair of timing belts, a Honda service manual, and a new solenoid arriving in the mail.

Last night I started with:

and when I went to bed, I had ended up with this:

The only bit of the bodywork that remains is the fender and I was too worn out to take off the front tire. The timing belts arrived Sunday (I really felt bad that they dragged the poor mailman to my house to deliver timing belts that are just going to sit in the garage for at least a couple weeks), and I think the service manual and the solenoid will be waiting on my doorstep when I get home from work today.

It is amazing how much less room the bike takes up when all the luggage and stuff is removed.

Nice. I saw someone local is selling a rat GL1200, you could put the spare bodywork on it to sell. Might be more effort than you want, right now, though.

Yeah, I don't think I could cram another bike into the garage at this point. Plus, at what they're asking, I be hard pressed to make it worth doing. As I'm finding out, I'd be better off buying title-less or non-running examples and tearing them down to part out from a pure ROI and level of effort perspective.

I have to admit failure to my build thread tonight, though. After we got the kids in bed, I fell asleep and just now woke up due to a crushing sinus headache. While I was making dinner, though, I did try to plug in the new solenoid on the '87, but I suspect someone has done a bit of a hack job on the wiring because there's a ground wire where there shouldn't be and there was a bit of smoke escaping from the bike somewhere. The buzzer on dinner went off before I could investigate further, though, so I'll have to try to troubleshoot further Tuesday night.

I did one a few years ago, currently have a 1977 1000 in the garage.

Torque, low center of gravity; you can surprise a lot of profilers out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BHYhN3390

Wow, that looks and sounds absolutely amazing.

Now you're making me think I need to figure out how to stuff another one of these in my garage.

No, you need to buy a dualsport. We can start a motorallycross class.

I'm actually pretty sure I wouldn't live through a motorcycle racing attempt. =) Besides, I just took my first hit of karting and I think I need to avoid anything else that will turn into an expensive habit. I might be able to save a lot of money and see my family more often if I sold off all my cars and bikes and just took up H.

Aaaaaaanyway... Tonight's update (and I'm jazzed about this one):

When I put the solenoid on last time, things got a little smokey. So I went back out tonight with my trusty service manual wiring diagram in hand and attempted to figure out what was going on. I knew that there was some hacked up wiring, but I wasn't sure how bad it was, so I peeled back the electrical tape.

After tracing some wires around, I found that the solution was actually quite simple: The connector and the solenoid weren't really matched up. I shaved off the mounting tab (I'll throw a zip tie on there later) and reversed the direction of connection and there was no smoke or drama.

What I did get, though, was this:

It started right up and ran perfectly. I let it sit until the temp gauge got just in to the white, then I shut it down to test compression. Remember, the dealer/repair shop I bought it from advertised it on Craigslist as having low compression and told me that they were pricing it accordingly:

Now, I did screw up the first time on the first cylinder and forgot to keep the throttle open and got a 90psi reading, so maybe that's what the shop did, but as far as I can tell, these are good numbers for this engine.

The source of the smoke was also pretty easy to find. When the bike sits, a little oil leaks -- I think from the valve cover, but I'm not sure -- and drips onto the exhaust. Once the bike burns all that off, the smoke pretty much goes away. So that should be easy enough to solve.

All in all, I'd consider that a pretty successful night in the garage.

This whole project is awesome, but it is really awesome to see that it started right up and has good compression.

So, now, you don't even have to do an engine swap to get a running/riding Goldwing? Just got to figure out the wiring for the Aspencade dash? Cool!

Well. I'm a little torn on the dash. I've gotten a lot of advice that the digital dash is flakey and not worth the trouble. What I really need to do is sit down with the wiring diagrams for the '87 Interstate and '84 Aspencade and see how much would need to change. It would simplify bringing the on-board air suspension system over, since the readouts are part of the digital gauge cluster, but there are a few things that the Interstate doesn't have, like the gear selector sensor and the digital speedo sender. I think what I'm going to do is swap the tires, since the '84 has fairly recent tires without any dry rot or cracking, and go ahead and start riding it to see how it is and what it needs. In the meantime, I can continue to take the '84 apart to make more room in the garage and I can start sanding down the bodywork and getting it prepped for paint. Then, when I'm ready to make a decision about the Aspencade bits, it'll be when I'm tearing everything apart anyway to swap bodywork.

It is, however, absolutely awesome to know that I've got two good 1200 motors. Especially since the '87 version of the 1200 is supposedly improved a bit over the '84 version. If nothing else, it should help me to defray the overall cost of the project by a couple hundred bucks!

Judging from my experience with the two scoots, Honda's wiring actually makes sense, and they do a good job of keeping the wire colors consistent (except the damn coolant temp sensor), so doing a partial harness swap or merge to get the Aspencade bits might not be too difficult.

Yeah, I was spot checking a few little things between the '84 and the '87 and the handful of things that I saw all looked consistently colored. I've also heard that all the bikes got the same wiring harness, no matter if they were destined to become an Interstate or an Aspencade, but there were a few changes from year to year.

Tonight I got the wiring tidied up a little bit for the main solenoid. I'm not sure how it ever worked before, but I put a new copper lug that was shaped properly for the starter power and built a new cable for the battery connection. Now everything fits nicely where its supposed to go and there isn't any weird stress on any of the wires.

I started with this:

and wound up with:

It doesn't look like much of a change, but it really is!

I booked out of work early tonight since it's an awesome day out today and took the Wing for a ride. I didn't go too far, but the bike has tons of power and other than a few rattles rides really well. There is still plenty to be done, but the thing is officially a runner.

I did discover that the cooling fan is not coming on, so the bike overheats when it sits. I think tonight and tomorrow I'm going to do the timing belt and swap the tires, so while I have it apart I'll figure out why the fan isn't working.

Sweet! So is this the Orange beast that you are riding?

Yep, the ugly orange 1987 that I got cheap because the motor was bad. (Or not)

I have a confession to make: I am a horrible build thread writer.

I went out into the garage three or four times yesterday, but each time the intention was just to check the fuse on the 87 for the fan so I didn't take the camera out. Each time, however, I crossed the threshold into the garage and lost my mind a bit and started take more stuff of the 84.

So I don't have any pictures, but basically the motor is out, the gas tank is out, the wheels are off, the rear suspension is off, the rear end and drive shaft are off, and the frame is tucked back in the corner a little more.

Tires look decent. They have a 2011 date code, have held air for the last two months at least, and don't show any signs of rot. They're not brand new by any stretch, but they're not that close to the wear marks either. Assuming the speedo will plug in, I will probably swap wheels.

I think each bike has one leaking rear shock and one good one. How providential!

Eventually I got around to checking the fan fuse and it is good, so next I need to try applying voltage directly to the fan to see if the fan itself is bad, then track back through to the temp switch. Good news is that I have an extra one of those!

Everybody says to skip the Clymer and Haynes books because they aren't accurate and skip steps so you're supposed to shell out big bucks for the official Honda manual. Let me save you some time and tell you that the Honda manual lies. The gas tank does not simply slide out the back, and they miss a handful of things that need to be done to remove the engine.

It's a little bit sad to see the 84 nothing but a bare frame in the corner. It did look like there was some oil under the timing cover, though, which could mean a leaking front seal. And since that seal is NLA, I'm not sure that could be fixed with anything short of a new motor. I do know that timing belts don't like oil, so the only other remedy might be to do a timing belt job every year.

On the 84, I need to start boxing up parts to get them out of the way. Then I'm going to set up my PVC and plastic paint booth again and start prepping to repaint the plastic bits. The 87 needs to have the tires changed out and the cooling fan fixed and then I'm going to try riding it as-is for a while until the bodywork is ready. Then I can do the belts, fluids, and change out bodywork all at once.