Plodding on!
Lots of things speed up and slow down any restoration, be it boredom, laziness, a lockdown, family or otherwise. So much has happened in the last year, but Bruce is trying to get on with the marvellous Mille.
So, I bought a year 2000 RSV Mille for £550.Yes, it arrived in carrier bags. Yes, I nearly set fire to my garage trying to get the thing started. Yes, I realised almost instantly that I was farther out of my depth than a fish on top of a mountain.
Luckily for me, I’m surrounded by mates that know far more than I do about nuts and bolts and engines, as you will have seen with parts one to three.
Yes, I’ve thrown money at it and yes I’ve also lost a little bit of direction. As I’m sure you can all appreciate. Hasn’t this happened to us all?
Suddenly, I had some impetus once more. The plan is to get this bike fully running and finished before I’m old and frail, and work carried on through various lockdowns. Jim at Alonze Custom finished welding a plate on to the swingarm to give it a racier look. It was then handed over to Nightingale Vapour Blasting, where frontman Ricky gave it some serious deep cleaning with glass bead, removing all the scuffed, anodised finish on the arm in the process. Next in line with this never-ending production was my friend Craig Brocklebank, who polished its external faces to within an inch of their lives. I’ve got to say, the whole process left me questioning whether I should’ve just stuck with the stock look of the item, but such crazy thoughts soon disappeared the instant Craig rocked up with a shiny, stunning swinger that simply needed fresh bearings and a coat of lacquer from Clive White at Rapier Paint to see it back at home on the bike a year after I’d removed it.
But then, a problem. If you’re familiar with Mille swingarms, you’ll know the uniqueness of the challenge, which sees an arrangement of doubled stacked, sealed bearings and a huge roller needle-type item blended into its DNA. I’ll admit, this was new territory for me, but searches on internet forums gave me a few necessary pointers and hammered home the necessity to replace the shock linkage bearings (all six of them). In total I changed nine bearings in this department, and not one of the originals looked fit for purpose. But what would you expect from a 20-year-old motorcycle?
I got all the bearings needed for around
£50, with some Koyo steering head bearings setting me back just £20 more. I forked out a further £15 on front and rear wheel bearings.
For those following the build from the outset, you might recall that Bry at Tecnicolour kindly blasted my original wheels in readiness for painting, but it turned out they were battered. Thankfully, there are plenty of parts for Milles available and I was able to pick up a straight, decent-looking pair for £150. What I couldn’t have predicted was they were finished in powder-coat.
Because of our plan to give the whole bike (and wheels) a proper custom paint job they needed to be stripped, and Clive’s mate John of JP Wheels in Hull soon helped out. As well as bead-blasting and powder-coating, they also do acid-dipping. While amino acids are good for the body, a blend of dichloromethane, methanol and hydrofluoric acid is anything but. I could
Sorting a linkage issue. tell as much from the smell it kicked out, buried in a bespoke-built corner of the wheel-prepping specialist’s workshop. “Around five minutes in that and your wheels will look as good as new,” I was told before handing over my wheels for some unadulterated stripping.
True to John’s word, the process was done and dusted that quickly and the wheels were then entered into a huge chemical cleaning system to neutralise any nastiness. The final bit of prepping was in a bead-blaster, with a really fine grain of filing being fired at the wheels to etch them perfectly for Clive’s spraying. That was after I’d fitted some new wheel bearings (once Clive had shown me how to do that, of course!).
Before any wheels could be fitted anywhere, first the bike would need to be reacquainted with its forks and swingarm. While Clive set to drilling and tapping a snapped bolt in the swingarm, I knocked out the old bearing racers from the headstock. The Mille is a nicely designed and built bike, and it was great to see there were specific channels on opposite sides of the headstock to knock the old racers out. It was simple enough to do, and fitting new racers didn’t prove a challenge either.
That’s where the pleasure ended and the pain began. Rob Bean had kindly hooked me up with custom yokes for the Mille that would mean I could run my 50mm diameter GSX-R forks on the bike. Before first lockdown we’d offered things up and it looked as though the custom yokes’ stem was actually out of a Mille, sporting the same shaft dimension and everything, but fast forward to the present and the reality hit home that the stem was 5mm too short. Gutting, especially after Craig had given the items an awesome polish and custom fitted the Mille’s ignition barrel on to the donor yokes.
With engineering, things are either right or they are wrong, and this case smacked profoundly of the latter. I had reached a dead-end, and now the challenge is on to get a new, longer stem made so we can get the front-end of the bike built up. It’s all way over my head, but there are folk out there smart enough to machine such a thing so I’m sure it’ll be a job we’ll tick off sooner rather than later.
My attention soon turned to the rear of the bike, and the fitment of the swingarm. The bearings were in place, and after lavishing the needle bearing and the swingarm’s spindle with lube, in it went. Soon after the shock and linkage joined the mix, and the Mille suddenly started to look less neglected with its rear-end partially assembled.
The polished, lacquered swingarm actually looked a near-identical finish to the anodised frame, which was a real result. It was my first real chance to take in the new look of the bike and I liked what I saw. I was so enthused: we’ve all had those moments when we finally see some progress after many back-tracks!
I decided to fit the pegs and hangers, which was anything other than straightforward. When I’d bought the bike both parts in question had been sprayed blacker than a Goth’s bedroom, so I’d had the hangers powder-coated and the pegs blasted back to plain ally. It meant the pegs and springs needed reassembling on the hangers, and figuring out how to get the pegs folding as they should took an embarrassing amount of guesswork. I was armed with two separate workshop manuals but neither offered any pointers for this problem, which turned out to be straightforward in the end. A lot of the nuts and bolts on the bike are knackered or missing, so the decision to invest in a few kits from Racebolt proved a sound choice. I’ve got everything from screen
bolts to fairing kits lined up for fitment, but at this stage in the build I was only ready to add some shiny hanger bolts into the mix. The upside is they were the perfect length, a pleasure to fit and looked awesome. The downside is they showed up how crap and weathered the other bits of the OE bolts now looked. I’d love to change every nut and bolt on this bike, but that’d probably mean the kids would have to go without socks and shoes for a few years, and the missus probably won’t agree to that. In time, I’ll probably take some of the scabbier original items out and give them a proper clean-up or blast, but for now I’m just focused on getting the bike built back up.
I’ll not lie, it’s a daunting prospect, because I can’t remember where half the bits I’ve got came from, but with every bracket fitted and every component reattached, there’s a real buzz to be had. It’s like being a kid again and building an Airfix model: only one that makes noises and goes fast. Or at least that’s the plan. I’m in regular contact with Griff Woolley at AP Workshops, and that man is the definition of ‘helpful’, so I know if I’m properly stuck I can always get on the blower and get pointed in the right direction. Yep, there’s still a bloody long way to go until we reach that finish line, but the wheels are once more in motion (hypothetically), and that’s all that really matters. Rome wasn’t built in a day… erm, or in a (lockdown) year!