1987 Honda Goldwing Interstate

I went out into the garage three or four times yesterday, but each time the intention was just to check the fuse on the 87 for the fan so I didn’t take the camera out. Each time, however, I crossed the threshold into the garage and lost my mind a bit and started take more stuff of the 84.

So I don’t have any pictures, but basically the motor is out, the gas tank is out, the wheels are off, the rear suspension is off, the rear end and drive shaft are off, and the frame is tucked back in the corner a little more.

Tires look decent. They have a 2011 date code, have held air for the last two months at least, and don’t show any signs of rot. They’re not brand new by any stretch, but they’re not that close to the wear marks either. Assuming the speedo will plug in, I will probably swap wheels.

I think each bike has one leaking rear shock and one good one. How providential!

Eventually I got around to checking the fan fuse and it is good, so next I need to try applying voltage directly to the fan to see if the fan itself is bad, then track back through to the temp switch. Good news is that I have an extra one of those!

Everybody says to skip the Clymer and Haynes books because they aren’t accurate and skip steps so you’re supposed to shell out big bucks for the official Honda manual. Let me save you some time and tell you that the Honda manual lies. The gas tank does not simply slide out the back, and they miss a handful of things that need to be done to remove the engine.

It’s a little bit sad to see the 84 nothing but a bare frame in the corner. It did look like there was some oil under the timing cover, though, which could mean a leaking front seal. And since that seal is NLA, I’m not sure that could be fixed with anything short of a new motor. I do know that timing belts don’t like oil, so the only other remedy might be to do a timing belt job every year.

On the 84, I need to start boxing up parts to get them out of the way. Then I’m going to set up my PVC and plastic paint booth again and start prepping to repaint the plastic bits. The 87 needs to have the tires changed out and the cooling fan fixed and then I’m going to try riding it as-is for a while until the bodywork is ready. Then I can do the belts, fluids, and change out bodywork all at once.

I booked out of work early tonight since it’s an awesome day out today and took the Wing for a ride. I didn’t go too far, but the bike has tons of power and other than a few rattles rides really well. There is still plenty to be done, but the thing is officially a runner.

I did discover that the cooling fan is not coming on, so the bike overheats when it sits. I think tonight and tomorrow I’m going to do the timing belt and swap the tires, so while I have it apart I’ll figure out why the fan isn’t working.

Tonight I got the wiring tidied up a little bit for the main solenoid. I’m not sure how it ever worked before, but I put a new copper lug that was shaped properly for the starter power and built a new cable for the battery connection. Now everything fits nicely where its supposed to go and there isn’t any weird stress on any of the wires.

I started with this:

and wound up with:

It doesn’t look like much of a change, but it really is!

When I put the solenoid on last time, things got a little smokey. So I went back out tonight with my trusty service manual wiring diagram in hand and attempted to figure out what was going on. I knew that there was some hacked up wiring, but I wasn’t sure how bad it was, so I peeled back the electrical tape.

After tracing some wires around, I found that the solution was actually quite simple: The connector and the solenoid weren’t really matched up. I shaved off the mounting tab (I’ll throw a zip tie on there later) and reversed the direction of connection and there was no smoke or drama.

What I did get, though, was this:

It started right up and ran perfectly. I let it sit until the temp gauge got just in to the white, then I shut it down to test compression. Remember, the dealer/repair shop I bought it from advertised it on Craigslist as having low compression and told me that they were pricing it accordingly:

Now, I did screw up the first time on the first cylinder and forgot to keep the throttle open and got a 90psi reading, so maybe that’s what the shop did, but as far as I can tell, these are good numbers for this engine.

The source of the smoke was also pretty easy to find. When the bike sits, a little oil leaks — I think from the valve cover, but I’m not sure — and drips onto the exhaust. Once the bike burns all that off, the smoke pretty much goes away. So that should be easy enough to solve.

All in all, I’d consider that a pretty successful night in the garage.

I have to admit failure to my build thread tonight, though. After we got the kids in bed, I fell asleep and just now woke up due to a crushing sinus headache. While I was making dinner, though, I did try to plug in the new solenoid on the ’87, but I suspect someone has done a bit of a hack job on the wiring because there’s a ground wire where there shouldn’t be and there was a bit of smoke escaping from the bike somewhere. The buzzer on dinner went off before I could investigate further, though, so I’ll have to try to troubleshoot further Tuesday night.

Last night I started with:

and when I went to bed, I had ended up with this:

The only bit of the bodywork that remains is the fender and I was too worn out to take off the front tire. The timing belts arrived Sunday (I really felt bad that they dragged the poor mailman to my house to deliver timing belts that are just going to sit in the garage for at least a couple weeks), and I think the service manual and the solenoid will be waiting on my doorstep when I get home from work today.

It is amazing how much less room the bike takes up when all the luggage and stuff is removed.

The night’s full progress gallery is here.

I didn’t do anything with the bike last night, however, I did make some more teardown progress on Friday night. While I’ve heard of the idea of ripping off the bags and bodywork and doing the naked Goldwing thing, I never really understood the attraction. It’s not something that I’m going to do — I want something I can load up and take a trip on, not a muscle bike — I can totally see the attraction as the bodywork comes off.

I have all the luggage removed, the rear crash bars,the grab bar, and the front fairing is coming apart nicely as well. Later on when I get back to it, I want to finish removing the fairing, the front fender, and the engine crash bars so I can have the bike cut down to size and a !little more manageable for getting the actual mechanicals of the bike pulled off.

In the next couple of days, I should have a new pair of timing belts, a Honda service manual, and a new solenoid arriving in the mail.

Dis-assembly progress photos.

More tear-down progress last night and I started asking some Goldwing people on a different forum for opinion and advice. Interestingly, the manufacture of rebuild parts for these engines has pretty much stopped and supplies of NOS parts are hard to come by. That means that if the motor needs new pistons or rings, I’m pretty much out of luck. The best that I can reliably do would be to buy used pistons with used rings and hope. The good news, though, is that it sounds like the motors tend to be pretty stout and hard to kill, so given the mileage, I might only be a head gasket away from a good motor already installed in the ’87.

I did have one interesting thing happen last night, though. As I was taking the ’84 apart, I saw just a little hint of a key down on top of the motor. Figuring it must be a spare key for the bike, I dug for a while until I could get it out. Turns out:

Toyota key! At some point, someone was tearing their whole house and everything else apart looking for a car key because it couldn’t have just disappeared, and yet it did. So, to whoever lost a key for their Toyota however many years ago: Good news. I found it.

The night’s teardown progress gallery can be found here.

This thing has turned into a pretty nasty albatross around my neck in a hurry. Apparently, despite promises to the contrary, the person that I bought this off of has no intention of ever following through on the paperwork that I need to be able to transfer the title, so this bike will never see the road again. I made a bad assumption about someone, and now I’m pretty much stuck with it. Lesson learned, won’t make that mistake again. For future purchases, instead of asking a seller if they have a clean title, the question is do you have a clean title in your name.

In the interest of making some lemonade out of this lemon, however, I have been searching for a title-donor. Since I was already going to need several hundred bucks’ worth of parts, I had been considering finding a junked out parts bike as a one-stop-shopping type of deal. What I’m going to do now, then, is use what I already have as a parts-bike and find something that I can title. To that end, I went to Columbus, OH yesterday and picked up a 1987 GL-1200 Interstate with a good title, bad motor, and awful color.

Last night, I got both bikes arranged in the garage along with my wife’s car, two other motorcycles, and a Phantom Grip install project for my rallycross Neon. Needless to say, it’s a bit crowded in there. My plan is to begin by tearing down the ’84 as quickly as possible while documenting the process, so I can make more room to work on the ’87. I’m not sure what order I’m going to do things in just yet, but I do plan to pick out the best parts of the body work and give them a fresh coat of paint and get the chrome in better shape so that it will at least look good. I’m also planning on taking the bad motor out of the ’87 and rebuilding it so that I’ve got a nice fresh-ish motor ready to go, just in case. There’s also the question of merging together the Aspencade parts with the Interstate. I’m an absolute fool for the digital dash of the Aspencade, so I’d like to bring that over, but we’ll see how crazy of a project that becomes. Anyway, on with the teardown:

Seat removed:

Faux tank removed:

That’s about as far as I got last night. By the time I cleaned up the garage a bit, got the bikes arranged, the trailer returned to the lot, and the kids in bed I was wiped out, so I plopped in front of the TV for a few minutes, had some beer, then piddled around for an hour or so. My OEM service manual is on-order right now, so I’m kind of groping around in the dark in terms of pulling things off the bike.

More pictures of last night’s tear down: 1984 Goldwing Aspencade teardown, day 1