Thanks for the tips man! I'm sure they'll come in handy .5speed wrote:That is looking fantastic...
Couple of pointers for the aluminum oxide.
Set your air pressure to around 40 psi max. It will do it's job but it will also give you more "mileage" out of your media.
Also..I always prebake anything I'm going to blast to cook out any oil, grease etc. I then wipe it down with gun wash (solvent for cleaning paint guns) if it has a lot of gunk on it.
Then I blast it, then wipe it down with the solvent..this time wearing nitrile or latex gloves to keep the oil from my hands getting on the metal.
Wear a respirator..this stuff creates a lot of dust.
A fyi type story.
When I bought the blasting cabinet I have now from the crown asset auction it came full of silica sand. To satisfy my curiosity I blasted a winchester model 94 I was refinishing with it.
It looked great as far as surface prep, the finish looked great after I baked it..and I proceeded to scratch it off with my finger nail.
So..out came the silica sand and in went the aluminum oxide.
Few things from yesterday... My meat thermometer arrived from Amazon...
Yep, gonna cook like a pro . Unit looks like pretty good quality for the money...
It's got a surprising number of features for the money. I might actually have to get one for my kitchen lol.
Looks like both probes read about the same. It was pretty warm in my truck with it sitting in the sun . Responds very quickly to temperature changes, and appears to be accurate. I really might buy one to use for its intended purpose lol.
It's supposed to read up to 700 something degrees I think, so it should work fine for PC. I actually tested it with my garage toaster oven last night when I baked my clutch lever...turns out it doesn't quite get up to 400*. It's kind of funny, but I guess I never really thought about it...I just set it to 400* and let it run. I guess it makes sense that the thermostat in it wouldn't exactly be laboratory grade...I mean, it's not like you need pinpoint precision temperatures to cook a bagel or a mini frozen pizza . Anyway, even though it doesn't quite hit 400*, it still apparently works... Speaking of the clutch lever, it turned out pretty nice.
I wasn't even thinking about the screw head being chromed until I tossed it back in there...I might want to black that out too. Also spent some time cleaning up the handlebar switches... The starter switch was pretty gooey.
I hosed it out with electronics cleaner, and smooshed some dielectric grease into it. MUCH smoother now, and I have to think it'll have lower resistance now too. Gave the same treatment to the high beam and turn signal switches.
High beam switch was was actually pretty stiff before...much better now. Before I had to kind of wrench on it, and now it feels like it should. Pretty glad I ended up digging back through all that stuff...
Oh, and I also confirmed this--
Lens is cracked . I noticed in one of my own pics yesterday that it looked like it had a line in it...figured it must be a weird reflection...it wasn't :/. I've had that side light wrapped up in a piece of fabric to keep it from getting scratched up while I've been doing this stuff...only thing I can figure is maybe I hit with the brake MC when I was taking the bars apart? I don't know...it's really odd. But, whatever...better to have the glass damaged than the paint I guess. At least it's an easy fix...if I buy another pair, I guess at least I'll have a spare .
Moving on to the shelter, I got the red layer set up... Here's one side with the top lines laid out.
And with the guide stripe pulled...
And with the tongue pattern in place...
And finally all taped up...
Looks a bit like one of the banana headed creatures from Alien lol. I'll hopefully spray a little primer on it at lunch, and the red when I get off work. Give it a couple of days to cure, and then it's on to what might be the biggest challenge--teeth .
My cable lube might be here tomorrow, so I can get the clutch cable installed...also need to hack together my PC oven, so plenty of stuff to do still .