My Yamaha Saga

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1Oldman
XJ600 Master!
XJ600 Master!
Posts: 3753
Joined: Mon Nov 07, 2011 4:16 pm
Location: Oceanside, CA

Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 2:35 am
So I bought this motorcycle off a tow company impound yard. It was dark and I really didn't get a good look at it but it started and ran and the price was good, $600, so I thought “what the heck”. They were even kind enough to deliver it to my house. Yup, what a deal. Clean up the carbs and it'll be good to go, or so they said.
It was not 'til I saw it in the light of day that I started to have my doubts. The thing had been sitting in impound for no telling how long. It was dirty, there were some good size dents in the tank, the fairing had some cracks and road rash,, it needed a battery, and it would start and idle but would die when you tried to open the throttle. Yikes, what did I get myself into? Had I known what lay ahead, I would have just stripped it down and sold the parts on eBay right then. But I'm retired, and more than a little bored, so I began to fix up this old motorcycle. This is the saga of my '93 Yamaha XJ600 S.

Now this is not my first motorcycle. I've been riding off and on since the mid 1960's. I've owned three Limey bikes and a couple of Harley choppers before the rise of the Japanese bikes. Had several smaller Jap bikes in the '70's, Bought and rebuilt one of those old and famous Honda CB750 Four's in the early '80s, which I still have by the way, and also currently own a very nice little '88 Honda NX125.
My purchase of the Seca II stemmed from a quest for a smaller, lighter bike than the old CB750. I have emphysema now and can't manhandle a bigger, heavier bike. I was looking out for a Suzuki 400 Bandit, which seem to be very hard to find, until this Seca II came along for $600.

After looking the bike over and knowing I was going to have to rebuild the carbs, the first order of business was to find a manual. I found one on CD, on eBay I think, and ordered that but for the actual wrenching I prefer a paper manual that I can keep on the work bench. I ordered a good Clymer manual, off eBay again, but received a Haynes by mistake of the seller. The Haynes manual was ok but I went ahead and re-ordered a Clymer which seems to be much more thorough.

While waiting for the manual to arrive I did a little research on YouTube on dent repair, For those of you that haven't tried it, You Tube has all manner of repair and do it yourself video's, gives you a big head start on what you're about to get into. Anyway, I ended up ordering one of those Pops A Dent kits that use the hot glue and bridge devise for paintless dent repair ($20). It arrived first so I set about trying to take the dents out of the tank. A motorcycle tank seems to be much harder to do than a car's hood but after repeatedly working around the dents they slowly but surely started to come out. Unfortunately, Pops A Dent didn't provide enough hot melt glue sticks to complete the job nor did they provide a means to re-order any more. Consequently, I had to locate and re-order more glue sticks from someone else and they worked but not quite as good as the original. None the less, the tank looks pretty good now with only one tiny spot where the paint needs to be touched up. I'm not necessarily pushing Pops A Dent but here's a link to what the system looks like. If I had it to do again, I think I'd get a little more professional system.


This tank used to have some fair size dents:

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Better to be over the hill than under it.

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