whodat90 Posted January 24, 2022 Share Posted January 24, 2022 A million years ago I had a Red (fastest color) VFR800, and enjoyed it for quite a while but ended up trading it for another bike just to have something different. The first VFR I bought for pretty cheap because it had been sitting in a basement for 9 years, and didn't run. I ended up having to rebuild the fuel system, pull the throttle bodies, fix and clean the injectors, replace the tires, replace rubber bits that dry rotted, etc. Which leads us to now. A buddy of mine had a 2000 Yellow VFR that he loved and put some miles on. Then he got married, and the riding happened less and less. Eventually the bike ended up at my place with the thought that he'd come out and ride it (I live in the middle of a lot of great riding) sometimes. Moving forward 11ish years, he moved away and before he left he came over and gave me the title. So I had another project to play with, yay! Where it sat for all those years. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Freshly washed just to make it easier to work on. Note the date on the inspection sticker. Washed ready to work on by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr In the barn for the diagnostics. Cleaned up ready for fixing by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Last gallon of gas from the tank. The problem with these bikes is that if you run the tank dry, it still leaves all the fuel in the lines and throttle bodies. This is what the owner of my red bike did. This bike just sat with a half-full tank. Last gallon of old fuel removed by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Didn't hear the fuel pump run when I applied power to the bike so out it came. Fuel pump bad by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr And yup, there's rust. And you can see some of the rubber bits that broke off inside the tank. Rust in gas tank by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Fuel level sender was bad too. Took it apart, cleaned it, reflowed the solder on all connections and it works now. Fuel level sensor by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Filled the tank with evaporust and let it sit for a couple hours, drained it out and checked: After first cleaning by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Put the evaporust back in and let it sit overnight with a spare fuel pump circulating it, then washed it out with degreaser, set a spare radiator fan on to dry it (the radiator fan which I originally bought for my last one to see if I could put one on the left radiator) and now there's no rust. After a day of drying I used a long bent spray nozzle to reach into all the nooks and crannies to blow the junk out of the tank. More reasonably sized fan to dry tank by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr After cleaning and de-rusting by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Then I pulled the throttle bodies out and removed the injectors. Gross. Grossness in the injector hole by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Grossness in the injector hole by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Grossness on the injector itself by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Cut up a ford car stereo connector to fit the injectors and made myself an injector cleaner. Modified car stereo connector by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Homemade injector cleaner by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Injectors cleaned they were reinstalled and the throttle bodies reassembled. The new fuel pump arrived. New fuel pump and filter assembly by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Had to redo the wires to match the new pump. Different connectors by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr New ends crimped to new wires by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Reassembled, but waiting on new gaskets. Reassembled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr While I was waiting I changed the (zero mile but years old) oil. Went ahead and put a magnet on the drain plug too. The magnet is actually pressed into a recess I lathed into the end of the bolt, the epoxy is just insurance. Neo Magnet on drain plug by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Replaced the air filter. Old vs new air filter by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Couldn't bear to wait for the new gaskets so I reassembled it temporarily with the old ones and voila! Bike started. This was pivotal because at this point I was only into the bike for a hundred or two. Buying tires and battery would only happen if I knew the bike was a runner again. First start in many years by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Now that I knew it wasn't a paperweight I went ahead and ordered a new set of pirelli angels. Pirelli Angel ST new tires by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Of course to get the rear wheel off the exhaust had to come off, and it was badly rusted on. Heat, tools, hammers, swearing, and ratchet straps eventually got it off. It has a D&D pipe, which is quite loud for my tastes. Hmm, I wonder what I have in my pile of leftovers from the old VFR? Stock exhaust by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr A stock pipe! Which is dead silent but just about doubles the weight of the bike so back in the pile it went. I cleaned up and lubed the D&D and reinstalled it. Maybe I'll pick up another Delkevic like I had on the last one. New tire installed by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr To balance the rear wheel I needed to turn a centering spacer. Rear wheel balance shaft by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Balance shaft installed by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Balanced out nicely. Then finally the rubber kit for the tank arrived so back off came the tank and all the old gaskets were tossed. These are the new ones. The old ones were dry rotted, cracked, and generally in poor shape. New rubbers by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Haven't bought it a new battery at this point so it's using a spare from an old goldwing I had laying around. Reassembled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Put in some LED brake light bulbs. LED on the right, halogen on the left. The difference is larger than it looks in the pics, the camera just gets overloaded by the amount of light. LED brake/tail lights by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Adding LED brake/tail bulbs. by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr LED Brake light install by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Then I decided to swap out the R/R. This is the harness I made to put the FH020 on. Yes I know I should solder the yellow wires. I may eventually do that, but this is still plug and play and I found no evidence of corrosion, overheating, looseness, etc. when I looked, and these connectors are in fact much more robust than the ones on my last VFR. I'll just add this to the regular inspection and if they show a need I'll get rid of the connector entirely. New Rectifier/Regulator harness by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Drilled and installed RivNuts into the mount for the new R/R. Riv-Nuts installed to mount new R/R by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Since the stock R/R used acorn nuts on the back to keep from digging into the wire harness I added a layer of anti-chaff wrap to it before installing the new R/R. Anti-chaff cover on main wire harness by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr And here it is installed. New Rectifier/Regulator installed by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Way back when it first came over to my place we installed heated grips, powerlets, a GPS, a voltage indicator light, and wired up a connector for the trunk to carry lights and power so really there's not much else for me to do on this bike. I bled the brakes (front and rear, not the linked parts; I'll get to that) changed the coolant, replaced a bunch of fasteners and generally gave it a freshening. Rode it a total of 50 miles so far, then the snows hit and now my driveway is 600' of ice. Anyway, good to be back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jroberts427 Posted January 24, 2022 Share Posted January 24, 2022 Looks good. She cleaned up nicely. Enjoy! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted January 24, 2022 Author Share Posted January 24, 2022 Thanks! It's been down a few times so the body has some challenges. I repaired everything I could from the back side using sheet ABS and ABS cement, but it's still pretty rough. I'm just going to run it like this for a while and if I decide it's a long term bike I'll probably order a new body kit from ebay. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Skids Posted January 24, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 24, 2022 Some great skills there, wish I could do half of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted January 24, 2022 Author Share Posted January 24, 2022 Honestly the only hard part of what I did was pulling the racks to get the injectors out. Like three octopi fighting each other there's so many hoses, wires, and cables. Everything else is simple and doable by anyone that can operate a breadstick. I do this stuff to relax (gone through probably 25+ bikes in the last 20 years) and I love it because it's not hard, just time consuming. It's relaxing to spend an hour or two slowly taking something apart, fixing it, cleaning it, putting it back together and polishing it. My Valkyrie was awful when I got it, now it's a monster. Get yourself something cheap and fix it up! Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer mello dude Posted January 24, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 24, 2022 Nice work! Congrats... VFR and Valkyrie... a great combination! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimC Posted January 24, 2022 Share Posted January 24, 2022 Excellent work and post! Thanks for sharing the story, photos, and descriptions. 👍 I wish I had the time, patience, and skills to do things like this. But while I may not be a guy who can restore a bike, I definitely appreciate folks who can. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Terry Posted January 24, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 24, 2022 You have created a great post here Whodat! Must be great to have such a set of skills and tools. The Evaporust + fuel pump to circulate it is a great idea, as is your home-made injector cleaner. The photos are also well done; I usually have too much crud on my hands to take photos when I am getting into a restoration project. Your bike a is a great colour too, this is my 1999 that I just bought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer bmart Posted January 24, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 24, 2022 Impressive work! When can you drop by? 🙂 I've never pulled the injectors from anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perrymike15 Posted January 24, 2022 Share Posted January 24, 2022 Wow this is some awesome work you did! I just came in from working on my '00 Yellow VFR and I thought I was having Deja Vu! I just picked mine up last week and it is in rougher shape than yours, but I think its going to be a good project. I need to just bite the bullet and pull the injectors off and come up with some method to clean them. My bike came in pieces so I put the air box lower back on and plumbed the tank thinking I would get lucky and it would fire, but no luck. I'll probably replace all the vacuum lines while I'm in there because taking that all apart isn't very fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Lorne Posted January 24, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 24, 2022 7 hours ago, whodat90 said: So I had another project to play with, yay! Now all you need is some white paint for those wheels... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer bmart Posted January 25, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 25, 2022 I really should have my spare set done in white or grey or silver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer DannoXYZ Posted January 25, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 25, 2022 White wheels are fastest! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer raYzerman Posted January 25, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 25, 2022 Ah yes, memories of my resto, I really should post up that story.... Congrats, I know how satisfying it feels. You guys and your white high maintenance wheels, lol. White wheels on a yellow VFR will slow it down...... I'd say go a nice medium dark bronze....... or if you stick with black, a nice metallic black perhaps with gold fleck in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Terry Posted January 25, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted January 25, 2022 31 minutes ago, raYzerman said: Ah yes, memories of my resto, I really should post up that story.... Congrats, I know how satisfying it feels. You guys and your white high maintenance wheels, lol. White wheels on a yellow VFR will slow it down...... I'd say go a nice medium dark bronze....... or if you stick with black, a nice metallic black perhaps with gold fleck in it. I had my 86's wheels powdercoated in white and the only thing fast about them is how quickly the back wheel looks grimy... I have a spare set of rims (currently gold, off a red 07) and was thinking silver-grey would be nice (but the black, like a SR-71A Blackbird, is fastest already). Found this image on the net, not mine. Of course one can also just wait for the dust to accumulate... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted January 25, 2022 Author Share Posted January 25, 2022 As cool a I will admit the white wheels look, it's a bit too prissy for me. I traded my last VFR for a DL1000 that I put TKC80s on, because most of the roads I enjoy are terrible. Hell, my driveway is 600' of bad gravel and dirt. BTW I just found the link to my previous VFR: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Bronco Posted February 1, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted February 1, 2022 A Yellow 1999 VFR; does it get any better than that? Mine is getting there too; slowly but surely............... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted February 16, 2022 Author Share Posted February 16, 2022 So not white wheels by any means, but the VFR, especially a bright colored one, has a vast dark area underneath. The black wheels, tires, engine cases, brake cover, calipers, radiators, exhaust, etc. just leave no visual interest or distinction. So I used the same brand (Keiti) of wheel stripe tape I did on my red VFR, and lo and behold, the color match was perfect this time also. Anyway, the applicator it comes on is awful. Zero percent chance of it working correctly as designed. I pulled the rear wheel off, cleaned up the edge of the rim with some rubbing alcohol (the whole bike is filthy but it's too cold to wash it; not too cold to ride it though) and applied it by hand. The yellow feels more fragile than the red and blue I've used before, but that could be because I probably did the other colors when it was warmer. Right now it's about 65* in my barn. Anyway, it broke occasionally, but that's not a big deal, just overlap the break a little bit and keep going. So much easier to remove the rear wheel now that the exhaust has a lot of antisieze on it. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Then 60lbs of wood pellets in the racing trunk and the front wheel was off the ground: Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Front wheel also came off easily due to the judicious application of antisieze. BTW I took the wheels off, cleaned the rim, then set the wheel on a home depot bucket and used a low stool so I was working comfortably with the wheel flat. Stuck down a few inches of tape, turned the wheel, stuck down a few more inches, repeat till done. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr How close is the color match? Check out the pic I took with the flash on. In this one you can see the bit of tape I had hanging off the gas tank in all the other pics. No, I didn't leave it there. I just had it on hand because the roll of tape doesn't come with a whole lot of extra and if I screwed it up and was a tiny bit short I'd have that on hand. And now I realize that that pirelli sticker is on the bike still, and although I do have pirelli tires on it I don't do stickers so it has to come off. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted February 16, 2022 Author Share Posted February 16, 2022 And man I forgot how much of a pain it is to bleed these brakes. Did it today because I had spare time. Fronts, no big problem. Rear, ok. Kind of a pain to do by yourself but not impossible. Secondary master to rear? Holy balls. Finally got a system worked out. Squeeze front caliper with a quick-clamp to the fork leg to compress the mc. Crack the rear caliper bleeder. Remove the quick clamp, step on the rear pedal to force new fluid in the smc. Repeat a million times till new fluid comes out. Yes I followed the manual, but still. Pain to do by myself. And yes, I know, bypass the linked brakes. Too pricey to do right, and this is strictly a low-budget bike for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer bmart Posted February 16, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted February 16, 2022 I've started doing mine when I change tires and the wheels are off (instead of every Spring). Much easier, especially the back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Skids Posted February 16, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted February 16, 2022 I shall be doing mine soon when I swap in the braided brake hoses. I'm going to install speed bleeders as well as it does make the whole process a lot easier. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted February 19, 2022 Author Share Posted February 19, 2022 Because reasons I decided to go to LED headlight bulbs and turn signal/running lights, as well as a LED specific blinker relay. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr So now the lights are brighter, I use less electricities and I shouldn't have to pull the fairings off again for a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whodat90 Posted February 21, 2022 Author Share Posted February 21, 2022 One of the bar ends was missing from the VFR. I went into my bin of spares and found the one that had been on it, but also realized it was ugly which is why it was removed in the first place. I looked on ebay but nobody was willing to donate them for free so I figured I'd grab a whunk of aluminum and make one. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr I didn't have a matching countersunk screw so I had to use a SHCS instead. NBD, unless you're specifically looking for it you'd never notice the difference. I rebated the inner edge to give additional clearance to the throttle tube/heated grip. The finish was near polished when it came off the lathe but I scuffed it up with some 400 and 800 grit sandpaper to get a surface for the paint to stick to. Used some semigloss black I had on hand, which turned out more gloss than semi. Oh well. It's less shiny in person than in the pic, and I figure a bit of age will knock the gloss down quite a bit. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Then baked it in the shop oven for an hour to cure, let it outgass a bit more, then installed it. Untitled by Uncle Grr!, on Flickr Ta Daa! No money out of pocket, got to spend a bit of quality time with my lathe and mill, and now I have nice matching bar ends. Of course when I was making it out of aluminum (to match the OEM one) I found a chunk of stainless the right size to make a pair, and a chunk of Titanium the right size. Hmm. I'll probably leave well enough alone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer Dutchy Posted February 21, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted February 21, 2022 A bit of age use will rub that black right off...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Contributer raYzerman Posted February 21, 2022 Member Contributer Share Posted February 21, 2022 On 2/16/2022 at 1:00 PM, Skids said: I shall be doing mine soon when I swap in the braided brake hoses. I'm going to install speed bleeders as well as it does make the whole process a lot easier. When you put your braided lines on, fill the reservoirs, let gravity do its thing until you get the master cylinders primed and fluid at the conventional bleeder screws. Once the system is full, you can swap them out for SpeedBleeders. You won't be able to fill an empty system with SpeedBleeders installed....... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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