1970 Sportster Saga Part 2

Saturday night was a night for hanging out in the garage and looking at
this new thing that my wife had bought me. I mean really I sat out in
the garage and looked it over for quite awhile while Tracy ran off and
did some things.What did I find? Well a bunch but I knew that when I started.

Most of the things are little cosmetic things. For one it is in bad need
of a cleaning. After testing out some Nevr Dull on a small section
things started to get a wee bit shiny.

The bike has a 5 gallon Fat Bob tank on it which isn’t stock for those
of you who don’t know. I’m not sure when it was added but it was at
least 5 or 10 years ago when the paint job was done. The paint job still
looks great except for one chip on the front fender. Not show good
though but it still looks nice.

Anyhow, the Fat Bob tanks are two separate tanks that attach together.
As a result there is a seem up the middle and an indention at the top
for the speedometer to go. On this particle tank is a speedometer
console that came from somewhere. Covering up the gap from the attached
tanks underneath is a hand cut piece of leather. To be more precise it
is leather from the previous owners first leather jacket. Yeah this area
is being addressed. I did order something off of eBay that I thought
might work but after further thought I’m not sure. Oh well, won’t know
until it arrives.

Moving on to the carburetor. Here is the old leaking AMF carburetor that
is getting replaced with a new Mikuni on Thursday.

At some point not too long ago this bike got a new 21 inch front with
twisted spokes that look pretty sharp. Along with this rim it received
dual disk brakes from a 1978 to 1983 Big Twin or Sportster XL. Took me
about three minutes to figure this out once I plugged the numbers from
the calipers into the garage computer. The original front brakes on this
bike would have been drum brakes. The rear brake is still original
though. I am glad it has disk brakes in the front but they are very
tight. Upon removal I discovered they are extremely greasy so cleaning
that up and bleeding the brake lines possibly on Thursday.

That’s it for this update. Tomorrow I am working on it and might need to
setup a YouTube page to upload some video to when I fire it up.