KLR 250 Project: Part VI

There hasn’t been much progress with the KLR 250 as of late. This is due to two things: First, I’m still waiting for a crucial part – the kickstart spring; and second, it’s been just too damn cold. Even my building buddy is growing crazy-eyed when he sees the lack of progress.

The part should be here soon, or so I keep hearing from my dealer, although he has been telling me the same for two weeks. Today, I finally got the call that my spring arrived. Well, after a twenty minutes drive over there, I found out that the supplier sent a kickstand spring instead of the kickstart spring I ordered. Thus, we are back to square one on this issue.

The cold itself does not bother me, despite the fact that my garage is unheated. It, however, does bother the painting schedule. There simply isn’t any way to get a decent paint job done at temperatures hovering near 30 degrees. While I was lucky enough to get the frame and subframe done during the last two nice days we had, there wasn’t enough time to get the tank done as well. Instead of trying to heat the garage and keep it above 60 degrees, I resolved in dropping the tank off with a buddy of mine, who owns a body shop. Not only is his place heated, but he will also use decent two-part epoxy paint on the tank, which is something I could not have done myself. The color of the day? Flat black.

In the mean time, while it was still warm outside, I managed to paint the plastic parts with truck bed coating.

Initially, I was leaning towards gloss black, but the polymer coating wears better and is easier to touch up. Lets be honest here: The KLR will see about 90% dirt and 10% pavement, and thus is likely to be dropped, scratched, and molested in ways unimaginable. There will be damage, and there will be touch ups.

Lastly, I took the forks apart and drained them. Whatever the fluid in the forks used to be is unknown to me, but what came out was a very liquid emulsion of old oil and water, which explains the non-existent damping force. Right now, the forks are standing upside-down to drain all remaining fluid out.

Tomorrow, I’ll clean everything with a solvent, replace the seals, and fill them up with fresh 10W fork oil. A few pounds of air pressure and they should be as good as new. My new fork protectors should arrive next week, which should allow me to bolt everything, except the engine, back together. Once I have a rolling frame, I can start working on repairing the wiring harness.