Brief background, I bought this bike over the winter from a friend. The bike has 20k miles on it and has been sitting since 2008. This is my first bike and I decided to take time over the winter to go through the bike, tackle a lot of larger maintenance items and clean and spiff things up. I documented in a picture gallery everything I did. This was an extemely relaxing project. I generally do this kind of work on my cars and it's so much easier on a bike.

Here's a before and after:





And some of the work I did along the way:









The full gallery is here: Nick's Car Gallery :: Heavy Maintenance & Cleaning

And have some final pictures here: Nick's Car Gallery :: Winter Work is All Done - 2/10/12

When I got the bike the sprockets and chains were fairly new and the brakes were recently done. I ended up doing things like pulling out the cooling system, cleaning everything out, painting it all. I did this with quite number of things on the bike. It's hard to see in pictures of the before after but the bike looks almost new in person. I'm really happy with how it came out. The only major thing left is to change my fork oil, which I'll probably do next winter.

 

A nice job. The wheels and exhaust really benefited from the cleaning. I probably would have done the forks and rear linkages when the wheels were off though.

You only replaced the front tire? I also would have replaced both tires since it sat since 2008.

Keep up the good work.

 

Looks great! Cant beat those ole 500's! Hey drag.......you got a long lost twin! haha

 

Thanks guys.

Dragone#19: The rear tire was new in 2008 he had to get right before parking the bike. The tire has little wear and no cracks or anything in it so I felt it was safe.

The rear linkage I'll probably do when I need to replace the chain and sprockets again and I have the forks lined up for next winter. Taking the front tire off was a 5 minute job so doing it again is not a big deal. It's more trouble to pull of that front fairing than the tire, heh.

 

Nice job! And a clean project if I do say so myself.