A Milestone Day!

[Drumroll please]…And here is the great reveal! The restored bike is now mechanically reliable with its newly geared starter motor and rebuilt carburetor. The chrome and tank have been polished, and the bike sports newly powder coated side panels.   

There's still some work to be done in due time:

• New ignition (the old one was drilled out so we've been using a screw driver to turn it on and off)
• Right exhaust actually has a hole in it
• Steering lock needs a key cut
• Spokes eventually need to be polished
• Brake has some paint chipped off and exposes rust underneath
• Engine could use some cleaning

In scrutinizing every component to make sure that they work, we've come to appreciate the mechanical simplicity of this bike as well as the Italian engineering. Not always perfect engineering – where we struggled with that starter motor's rarity of the gears, and removing the instrument gauge had us scratching our heads thanks to those oddball plastic nuts that required a special tool. We're pretty pleased with the bike, and ourselves for getting this all done, and in less than a month!