Well, with a few days off over the hol­days, I’ve got­ten the 305 Dream to the point where I don’t believe there is any­thing unsal­vagable here, and it won’t take an exor­bi­tant amount of mon­ey to put this thing back on the road in nice shape. The last few hours of work have been to get the frame stripped of all oth­er parts, so I can start clean­ing it and get­ting it ready for blast­ing and paint. Here’s the parts that will be going out for paint, plus the tank, once it’s clean inside.

swingarm, front fend­er, frame

front fork, side­stand and foot­peg mount

I have a large list of parts I need (sent off to cyclepsy­cho to see what he might have), and a cou­ple of unsolved prob­lems. I am as yet, unable to remove the steer­ing head nut from the top of the stem. I think I man­aged to move it with a pipewrench, so I gave it anoth­er soak­ing in Kroil and will try again lat­er. I still have one pis­ton with the rings firm­ly stuck in their grooves. and last­ly, I broke off a screw in the bot­tom of the fork (it holds a chrome cov­er in place over the front swing­ing arm and shock). I then tried to drill it out, but the drill wan­dered off course, so now I have a hole through the screw at an angle, and it goes through the threads part­way down. Grrrr… I’ll have to spend some qual­i­ty time with the dremel tool and see how bad off the threads are when I’m done.

the screw that got the best of me that day.

But over­all, pret­ty smooth­ly so far. at this point, it’s about get­ting the frame and paint­ed parts cleaned and repaint­ed, clean­ing out the bot­tom end of the motor, hav­ing the cylin­ders honed (bored if they don’t clean up well at std. size), and the start clean­ing and re-assembling.

mean­while, it all waits in a tidy pile. More pics later.

black­dog

Well, I now have the engine out of the frame, and the cylin­der head and both side cas­es off. The news isn’t all bad. Most of the engine looks in fine shape inter­nal­ly, as you can see here:

obvi­ous­ly, this engine has been sealed up, and has the low mileage indi­cat­ed by the odome­ter (5129).

There was a lit­tle bit of sludge in the bot­tom of the side case on this side, but noth­ing dra­mat­ic. remov­ing the cylin­der head, how­ev­er, revealed a whole ‘nuther picture:

obvi­ous­ly, the left cylin­der (on the right in this pic­ture) had some water in it for a while.

and look­ing at the cylin­der head, we can see why:

if you expand the pic­ture and look close­ly, you’ll see that the exhaust valve on the left cylin­der (again, right side in the pic­ture) is slight­ly open. so water vapor got in through the exhaust pipe, con­densed into a pud­dle, which then evap­o­rat­ed and rust­ed the cylinder.

still, noth­ing here looks unsal­vagable. the cylin­ders are cur­rent­ly soak­ing in Kroil, hope­ful­ly, i can beat the pis­tons out pret­ty soon and see what kind of shape the cylin­der walls will clean up into.

thanks for read­ing. more as i dis­cov­er it!

black­dog

Well, I am part way through the dis­as­se­bly of our Hon­da 305 Dream project. Some has gpne pret­ty smooth­ly, a few bits are being obsti­nate. One of the easy parts was the cool alu­mini­um carb cover:

the carb cov­er is intact and in decent shape.

the right hand engine cov­er is being obsti­nate, the screws are rust­ed and only 4 have bro­ken loose so far, and i’m puttin’ the hurt on my impact dri­ver bit. I did get the alter­na­tor cov­er off, and what i found wasn’t real­ly good news:

uh-oh, i think we’ve had some water in here…

After I saw this, I did drain the oil and there was near­ly a quart in the engine, so it hasn’t been *emp­ty* for all these years, but it might not be re-build­able. soon, i’ll get the engine out and apart and we’ll see.

Here’s the pile of parts that have come off so far:

head­ers, seat, bat­tery hold­er, etc. not in per­fect shape, but usable.

So the chal­lenges right now are: how to get the frozen rear brake back­ing plate out of the rear hub, and how to get the foot­pegs off so i can take the engine out of the frame. Sug­ges­tions are wel­come, as always!

black­dog