New member w/1966 CB77 restoration

[philrock]

Got the bike together and running. Many misadventures along the way, including broken piston rings, broken piston skirts, broken timing chain idler wheel, etc., etc.

New charging system from Charlie's Place, and turn signals (which I'll remove for an upcoming show).

Photo below.

The bike is apart again, for plating and painting.

The current challenge is bent front fork tubes. Not real bad, but as I was disassembling the fork tube assemblies, I noticed scuffing on the outside of the seal sleeves and the inside of the covers above those sleeves. Also, one of those covers is cracked in one corner of the opening where the triple tree arm sticks in. I think the crack resulted from a PO trying to bend the cover to eliminate the scuffing.

Today I reassembled the fork tube assemblies and put them in a lathe to check radial runout. I chucked them by the top end of the tube that attaches to the triple tree. The T.I.R. on one tube was 2 mm and the other was 0.75 mm.

I'm thinking these runouts are probably the cause of the scuffing mentioned above.

Actually, I chucked the tube in another way, as well, and was able to determine that there are bends both above and below the heftiest part of the tube.

While 2 mm T.I.R. sounds like a lot, it's only 1 mm per side, and I would bet the tube wobbles a lot more than that while riding on any road that's not dead smooth.

Questions:

1. Are the bends just too large to live with?

2. If the bends are not too large, could I maybe center the covers on the seal sleeves by loosely assembling the whole fork, on the bike, then rotating the fork tubes until the sleeves center on the covers?

Phil