TOPIC: Look what followed me home last weekend... '81 IT175H

Inspection of the rod/piston.




Original piston shows normal wear, nothing out of the ordinary. The connecting rod has zero vertical movement from the lower bearing and just a bit of axial movement. I didn't measure it but it seems to be within spec. New O/S piston, pin, upper bearing should fix it right up.

I took advantage of the long weekend and a brief break in the weather to soldier on with my project.

Stripped the rest of the components off the frame. Getting ready for cleaning...


What a greasy grimy mess, soooo much scrubbing. In the end it cleaned up really nice and inspection revealed only a few spots of surface rust. Frame looks great structurally, no cracks or bends, welds loog great. I'll treat the rust with a rust converter product then scotch brite the frame to knock off the gloss and respray, when the weather allows...

Rebuilt the front forks.

The seals looked original and were stuck in there good. It took just about all my strength with a seal puller to get them free, but in the end they popped out. The dust seals disintegrated into crumbly dust on removal. There is a special damping rod holder made by Yamaha to separate the fork tubes, but I just hit the rod holding nuts with my impact wrench and an 8mm hex socket and the came right off.


Original seals removed


Original seal configuration


New AllBallz seals installed. You do not use the original metal dust seal retaining ring with the new style dust seals. Original dust seals are NLA from Yamaha.

Also got to the swingarm



A fair amount of dings and scratches but cosmetically I'm leaving as is. Cleaning and inspection showed the bearings & bushings in excellent shape, barely any wear. So new seals and lots of grease and it should be good to go.

Air box.

Could Yamaha have come up with a more complex one for this IT?




Anyway, the seal on the inside of the air cleaner cover was missing so I replaced it



Inspection of the other parts showed missing/loose seal & gasket material so I went ahead and fixed those too. Luckily the gasket that I used in the lid was the same size as the other areas and there was plenty left over to do it all. That 3M Weatherstrip adhesive works great.

Some of the other areas that needed attention...

so everything is going along pretty smoothly. Cylinder is in EN's capable hands, getting all the systems inspected and spruced up. Then I got to the shock...



Not working right. I removed the spring and there is zero damping. And the damping adjuster only gives me about 6 clicks after which is just spins up the treaded shaft. Somethings not right. Shock stuff is definitely over my head so I'm kinda at a standstill here, until I decide how I'm gonna move forward

Edit: Well that didn't take long. I reached out to a friend of mine who used to race for Honda back in the day. He seems to know everybody in the business locally. He recommended LCS Racing in Palestine, TX. So I called LCS and spoke to Lucky (great guy) and the shock is in the process of being packaged up and sent to him. Lucky gave me a 3 week turn-around time estimate.

So got a bit more done this week...

New tires. I decided on IRC VE33/35 and IRC heavy duty tubes



Also scored an NOS rear sprocket from eBay cheap. Bearings and brake shoes front and rear. Cleaned and re-lubed the odometer gear (holy cow, it took about 1/2 can of contact cleaner to get all the oily gunk out).

Tackled the wiring...

Cleaned up really nice




Before

After

Nice work!

BTW, the front brake cam seal is felt and mine was disintegrating. They're also no longer avail from Yamaha and eBay search brought up zilch. So I went into my o-ring stash and found what is a perfect fit...

new o-ring on the left, OEM felt seal on the right



Fits like it was made for it


O-ring size is 10mm I.D. x 2.5mm section