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