Teardown 1 - Plastics and battery box

Ok, it's been a couple weeks or so. Been busy with my other life. Just life to most folk. You know, family, job, tutoring physics... normal stuff. So I've been promising to tell you all about the teardown process. I will say this, it's taken me 2 weekend afternoons to get to the point that I'm at as of 10:00 pm on May 15. The afternoons were reasonably free of interruptions. I'm just slow and I take pictures for you. There's also the meal breaks and the swapping out of DVD's and the odd diversion like moving my shop manual to a 3 ring binder which involved drilling and cutting. Ok, here goes.

You're gonna start here... bike on center stand, fully clothed. After last fall's foray into valve adjustment, I picked up the entry level bike lift from Harbor Freight. Getting the motor up in the air sure does help my back. The wheel clamp is pretty much useless, so after this photo was taken, I pulled it off.

For the most part, all you need to pull the fairings are a couple of allen wrenches. I use t-handles with ball ends. Since the bolts aren't under a lot of torque, the ball end type doesn't present much problem. I pull only the bottom and mid fairing. I leave the top fairing (nose piece) on. The dash infill panel needs to have the bottom right and bottom left bolts pulled so the left and right edges of the top fairing are free to be bent/lifted/moved a bit. That's the trick when pulling off the mid fairing. There's a bit of horsing you need to do to get it out from under the top fairing. I've been doing it this way since I've owned the beast and notice no problems. BTW, taking the mid fairings off is easier than putting them back on. I'll show you that when we put her back together.

After you strip the bodywork, this is what you're going to be staring at. There's a lot going on in there but we just need to focus on the battery box first. The connections to the battery terminals are straight forward. I have multiple ground and positive connections, so I wrote the order of placement on the heat shrink of each wire. Being a bit leisurely in my projects, I put the battery on my work bench tethered to a battery tender. With the battery out of the way, you need to deal with the ECU on the left and some other dangly bits on the right. I unbolted the ECU base plate rather than unplugging the ECU connectors. The round thingy on the right (starter motor relay) is attached to the mounting plate by a rubber connector that slips over a metal tang. The plate unbolts fairly easily, and there's a round connector on one of wires that pops off easily as well. So that takes care of the battery box area. You can now swing things out of the way and get to the horizontal belt cover (below, center). That's about all I have for the battery box. Tomorrow we'll go over pulling the radiator and disconnecting the lines that run into the gas tank. Why do I want to pull the radiator? It makes it easier to get to the horizontal valves. The oil cooler is attached to one of the horizontal valve covers... unmount that too. I tie it off with a length of wire so the oil lines aren't left to carry the weight. Oh yeah, fuel lines and such. Well, the fuel lines and breather hose are wedged between the vertical belt cover and a frame rail. Without moving them out of the way, I can't pull the vertical belt cover. Grrrrrrr, see below....