The beginning
So about year and a half ago i got introduced to scramblers and knew i wanted to build one some day. Until last summer i was a happy owner of a 2011 Kawasaki Z750, and because of that i didn't actively look for a project bike. Owning a bike in Finland is relatively expensive because of the high insurance costs, so having two bikes with the short riding season just didn't make sense to me, and at the same time i didn't want to let go of my Kawasaki.
Close to the end of summer 2018 some brilliant idiot decided to tip over a row of four bikes that were parked next to our building. (fourth bike had already been taken away by the time that picture was taken).
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[/Center]While a "small incident" the damages to my bike were big enough for the insurance company to offer me a bunch of money and take the bike away. Since i realized that this is my chance to start my very own scrambler project i decided to get rid of the bike and started to look for a project bike.
While i had been looking for some project bikes before, many of them were relatively expensive. But later on one caught my eye (actually already before i had to let my Kawasaki go). The bike was just what i wanted so obviously i was sure that either (as you can see i'm very optimistic):
a) it had a ton of modifications
b) it had a very expensive starting bike
But luckily for me, neither was the case, and the bike in question was a XJ600.
The project that i fell in love with was a build by Wrench Kings:
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[/Center]After some research i found that the biggest modification done to the Wrench Kings bike was the custom subframe, which is often a given in scrambler bikes in my experience and that i could find a project bike for a good price. The project had began.
The bike
After watching the local used bikes for a while i spotted one that seemed like a great bike to begin with. It had a bit lower price, because it also had been tipped over by someone and the fairings had some damage in them, but that wasn't an issue for me because i would remove them anyways. The bike was also relatively little driven, around ~40000km's (~25000 miles). (For comparison the other bikes were often driven around 100000km's or ~62000 miles.
Went to see the bike and ended up buying it and drove it to my mom's place nearby in a damn cold weather. Luckily the drive was only around 15 minutes. Here is the bike when i got it:
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[/Center]The first session
After a couple days i went and started to disassemble the bike. First plan was to just get rid of the fairings that were no longer needed.
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[/Center]After that i had to leave the bike for a few weeks. We needed to make some space to the garage in order to move the bike indoors, and i wanted to continue working on it indoors since it was getting a bit colder outside already.