Battery Update!

The old battery is up and running!

After the initial recharge failed I decided to let it sit on the charger for the better part of a day. Figured it wouldn't hurt as the battery was already dead. After about 18-19 hours of charging, I put it back on the bike and PLOWY! it had enough juice fire up the cm400t.

We've had a bit of a rain delay here, so nothing else has been done on the bike. Hoping to try the compression test tomorrow and see where we are.

Cylinders Soaking

Per a suggestion from Brian B. of the Yahoo CB750 group I decided to use diesel to soak the cylinders and rings. Seat came off, spark plug wires off of spark plugs, and spark plugs removed. Poured what I can only hope was a couple of tablespoons of diesel in each cylinder. The holes for the plugs are quite a bit recessed into the engine, so i had to "pour" the diesel in from the top. Lots of it on the ground, hopefully enough in the cylinders.
 Put spark plugs loosely back on, and now we wait.

Battery Recharge Failure

Battery did not blow up. Charged it once, put it on the cm400 but no go. Took it down to O'Reilly auto parts and had them charge. Still no go. Topped off the battery with distilled water and charged for a 3rd time. Charge got up to about 13.45 volts across the battery.  While observing the voltage across the battery I noticed that it appeared to go down over time..Not much, but a few 100ths of a volt. Disconnected the battery from the charger and started doing timed readings. The battery looses potential at a rate of approximately .01V / 15 seconds or .04V/minute. Yikes: 2.4V/hour. I don't know if the drop off is because i'm currently over the 12V rating, or from an internal short. To test this i'm going to do a few readings over a couple of minutes and see if the voltage loss starts to drop and if so at what rate.

Update: battery over 16 minutes started to stabilize at 12.58 volts or there about. Drop off in potential was linear until very near this voltage and then started to hold steady.

Put it on bike and still no good.

In the meantime I purchased a new battery at a local shop... That battery is reading a solid 12.68V w/ the bike off. No reduction in potential w/ time.

Battery Recharge

Guy who sold me the bike removed the battery before I bought it. Probably a reasonable thing. Anywho,  the only thing I've got sitting around is the battery from my 1980 Honda CM400T. Unfortunately, with one thing and the other, I left the key in the ignition a couple of weeks ago..... and then did it again a day or so after that.... Battery's been kinda dead since then. It's been a push start kinda month.

I guess I coulda taken the battery out, then driven in my car down to the auto parts store and had 'em charge it for me.. sounds like extra effort though.

A little googling, and a trip to home depot and BANG, trickle charger

What we've got here is a light bulb in series w/ the battery. A single diode is thrown into the mix to allow current to only flow one way. Uhh.... hopefully the right way.

You can find the link to the original web page here. Special thanks to the author of the original site. On first glance I thought the whole thing might blow up. But it seems to be working as seen here:

Battery started off at about 10.4V. After about two hours or so of charge i'm up to about 12 volts.. We'll see how it goes.

Order of things to do

ok, so need to kind of get an order to things here.

Here's what day one looks like:

1. Buy motorcycle cover of some sort
1. ok, so the thing is sitting in the parking lot of my apartment.. I don't really wanna have people throwing a fit that I'm working on my bike here. Best way I know to achieve this is an "out of sight, out of mind" policy. uhh.. looks like they're kind of expensive. so we'll go with the "home depot" tarp + bungee cord option.
2. remove seat
3. remove gas tank
4. remove spark plugs
5. spray in wd40. 
6. loosely put spark plugs back into spark plug holes
7. let sit for 1-2 days.
8. get cm400 battery charged
9. get 30 Amp fuse and fuse holder and install.. 
1. saw a "frankenstein" fix for this same problem on some other forum

Here's what day two looks like:

1. drain oil and refill
1. don't think i need a new oil filter just yet.. should be like a car oil filter, where it's just bypassed if crappy.
2. remove spark plugs
3. hook up battery and verify main power is on
4. crank engine over and feel for compression on each cylinder by placing thumb over spark plug hole. if this works then we'll move on.

I'm gonna stop here for now. If we don't have compression, then there might not be any reason to continue.

Things to Do.

Only wanna do the minimum required to get the bike running. This is to make sure I don't have a pile of crap before doing stuff like recovering the seat, buying new mirrors, etc.

So here's the list:

1. clean carburetors
1. gonna need some chemicals for this
1. ok.. so i think i need either brake cleaner, or carburetor cleaner... do i soak? boil? sonicate? Some web sites I've read indicate boiling the parts in "simple green", and others say sonicate in brake cleaner.. need to collect some resources here and see if there is a consensus.
2. what do i want to check works? here's what I do know
1. make sure that the "floats" actually float
3. i think it's important that I not touch the "rubber" parts w/ the organic chemicals.... but is this true for other parts? plastic stuff? 
2. clean gas tank
1. It looks pretty clean in there right now.. what i'm thinking here is to let the gas that's in it, run out through stop cock into a jar/container through a coffee filter.. do a couple of times and see what kinda crap we get.
3. check/replace gas line
4. check fuses required for engine to work and replace as necessary
1. definitely need to replace one that I accidentally broke while inspecting the bike.. never seen one like it before. It looked like a "main" fuse, and was literally a strip of wire between two screws and labeled "30A"
5. get a battery that can be used
1. gonna use the one from the cm400..  problem is, it needs to be charged
6. check compression.
1. probably need to do this w/ the gas tank off. Just gonna try and do the "simple" one, where I push down the my thumb on the spark plug hole and turn over the engine.
7. Test/replace spark plugs..
1. this one should be pretty easy.. Once I have a working battery, and electrical system.. pressing start should allow me to see spark on each of the plugs.
8. change oil
1. don't think i even need to replace the filter at this point.. but maybe not a bad idea anyway
9. "soak rings"?
1. ok, so while doing some initial research, i found some references to "soaking" the cylinders w/ some wd40, or penetrating oil, to allow the rings to come "unstuck" from the cylinders if they have rusted together to any degree.... Apparently if this isn't done, there is risk of "breaking" the rings.. which i guess would result in loss of compression.. ok.. so yeah.. wikipedia says they are there to maintain compression and prevent oil/air leakage...
2. But.. like i said.. they already got the thing to rotate.. oh well.. we'll soak a bit and try anyways.. 
10. anything i missed?

Bought the bike

Ok, got the bike for $350 off an add in craigslist. Came w/ a pink slip and not much else. Story according to the guy I bought it from was that he was selling it for a brother in law or some such, who had moved away recently. Apparently the bike had been sitting in the backyard since 1987.

Guy who sold it to me said that he had power washed it, and tried to get it to start w/ some carb cleaner sprayed into the spark plug holes.. apparently was able to get the engine to turn over and even rotate the wheels through the tranny.

So what I wanna do is the least amount necessary to get the bike up and running before putting anything else into it.