Since I don't open my shop on Sundays and my wife wanted to go out shopping with her friends it was the perfect time for me to go to the shop and mess with the Stingray build I'm in the early stages of doing...
Today's progress was stripping the bike down to just the bare frame and taking the fork apart... completely apart, every nut and bolt off apart...
Got the triple tree parts and dipped them all in the carb dip tank for about 30 minutes to remove all the paint from everything as well as any grease or anything else... After a 30 minute dip in the Berryman B9 Chem dip, the paint released it's self and washed right off with water. Once the parts were completely free of paint, rust, grease, and clean I let everything dry real nice and begun powder coating all the small parts as well as the upper and lower tripletree pieces. these were metallic candy red but I'm going with semi gloss black for most my pieces so today I was doing all my powder coating in semi gloss black.
i also worked the fork legs, kick stand, and bottom bracket getting rid of all the rust and removing decals etc, the kickstand I decided to paint semi gloss black with the Plastikote ceramic engine block paint, it matches the powder coat black almost perfectly and sticks to the chrome a little better, not to mention makes touch ups later on real easy if needed. I'll most likely just powder coat it later on after I get a sand blast cabinet to blast off the chrome, but for now this will work.
The fork legs were covered with rust so I got out one of my 4" angle grinders and used a 4" wire cup brush to get rid of the rust and remaining decal residue. The fork legs will also be painted instead of powder coated once I'm sure of what color schem I'm gonna go with, but I'm really leaning toward semi gloss black and lime green as my main colors with some green tru fire airbrushed on the frame and tank when I get that far with the build...
I didn't mess with the engine for it today at all but I'll do more with it after I get a set of billet mounts for it. I still need to buy a seat for this one and it's going to need a new chain on the pedal side since the chain that's on it has a section where the links are rusted beyond help, the rest of the bike and the frame aren't very bad, but the chain has a 4" section that's so bad the links won't move freely anymore so I'm not even gonna try to save that one.
Other parts I still need to round up are fenders, seat, chain, and brakes. I'm thinking about doing hydraulic disc brakes front and rear since the rims will be painted and rim brakes ruin painted rims... I'm also thinking about getting a set of hydraulic front forks foo a small dirtbike or moped if I can find the right diameter and length fork tubes that can fit in that tripletree, but I may use a full tripletree if I have to.
