Coming together

The triple has really come together in the last week. As an aside: it's fun how new jobs are intimidating, and after having worked through slowly the first time they then seem like a 'piece of cake' in hind sight. For example, setting up the breaks for the first time was definitely intimidating, seeing how critical a component that is. In the end it was pretty simple...

... I say in the end, as the breaks are the ones that had me scratching my head for a bit. I had filled the lines and then bleed them quite thoroughly. But as I tested the lever it kept getting soft. Tried bleeding again, no air coming out... "what's the deal? am I missing some special trick?". Then, as I noticed a puddle of fluid on the ground it turned out that the master cylinder banjo was loose (came loose in the crash?) and required some tightening. There quite a bit of travel in the lever before pressure in the cylinder, but when it does go on, it's SOLID.

The meat of the work was in mounting the triple tree, fork, wheel & breaks. That was time consuming, but in hind sight I could do it 2x as fast next time, not having to use references at each step of the way, and generally feeling more knowledgeable at each step.

The custom fabbed headlight mount went on the bike quite nicely after filing down the steering stops a tad. Will connect up the lighting system to check the level of the lights in case last bit of adjustments have to be made to the brackets.

As for another bit of 'custom fabrication' I love how the Monster turn signals turned out on the triple. First off their better quality items; and their modern design fits quite nicely on the rad covers of the '08 triple. They required a bit of tedious work with the dremel, but were worth every penny. Take a look at the comparison shot with once droopy original signal, and the other the new Monster one.