We all have small parts... No, I’m not talking about my own affliction, instead I’m talking about the small parts we all need to complete our restorations.
These are small parts that almost always seem to cost the earth from the manufacturers. These are the bits that get lost on the garage floor, the bits that never seem to be included in the box of bits the bloke gave you with the bike, or the bits that – should you buy the wrong replacement parts – will make you the laughing stock of the local club.
As you know, we’re great believers in make-do-and-mend at Ridertips and – yes – while we love the wallet-busting restorations we also like the rattle-can restos and shed-life real-life re-animation projects that you do on a budget. That’s why we had to give some space to our reader Peter Watmough’s ideas on how to rejuvenate and restore small parts. If it saves money, we think it’s a winner: over to you Pete.
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| They look rubbish going in. |
One of the problems faced when restoring an old motorcycle is the number of small brackets, bolts and other tiddly and otherwise fiddly parts that have seen better days and are annoyingly hard to replace. Larger parts such as frames, swingarms, subframes, seat pans and the like can be shot blasted, and/or stripped or rubbed down. But what about smaller parts? Manually cleaning, stripping and de-rusting all of the little parts you find on a modern classic motorcycle can be a real pain.
Nuts and washers can be replaced, but not so the specialised bolts and brackets that are found on many older bikes: parts that hold side-stands in place, or headlights, small brackets and specialised bolts. Sure, we could spend a lot of time and money reverse engineering things, but for many of us we can only really use what we’ve got, so we have to re-use what we have as replacing them could be out of the question.
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| Don't laugh! It works. |
The solution I have come up with is to use a hobby rock tumbler. Strange sounding name I know, but bear with me. These can be found on that wellknown auction site for around £20: and mine is a fetching shade of pink. They are commonly used to tumble stones and polish them for jewellery making. More robust (and expensive ones) are available, but I’ve been using this one successfully for the last two years with some great results.
To load the unit it’s a simple case of screwing off one end and putting the parts inside. I add a small amount of water (about a third full) a small amount of washing-up liquid and then some small stainless steel polishing beads. If you don’t have these then small ball-bearings or even washers can work as well. The abrasives and polish supplied in the hobby rock tumbler are not necessary for most of the projects we’d use the thing for, but keep them handy as you never know.
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| Like panning for gold. |
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| All the rust gone! |
For this example, I’m restoring some brackets normally found from the underside of the seat of a Kawasaki Z750 E1 that I’m currently restoring. Check out the first images on the top and you can see the age-old problem with these old parts. As is normal with bits on the bottom of a classic motorcycle’s seat, the spongy bit has simply soaked up all the water this, combined leaving the bike outside, has meant that most of the small metal parts under the seat aren’t looking their best. They’re rusty, oily and a real pain to clean one-by-one with solvent and a wire brush.
Who wants to spend all day doing that? All I did was remove them from the seat itself, add them to the drum, turn the thing on for 12 hours or so and then disappear to the pub. One thing you need to be careful of is this: just like the washing machine, you really shouldn’t overload it, or it won’t clean the parts effectively and could go bang under the stress. Better to do parts in batches.
So, all you do is add the parts, water, washing-up liquid and the polishing beads, then screw the end back on and switch the thing on. The drum then rotates like any washing machine and (as the name suggests) it tumbles the parts, which gently rub together and against the polishing beads and the old paint and surface rust is gently rubbed off.
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| Clean and ready for paint. |
In my experience, you do need a good 12-hour tumble to get parts clean and corrosion free. At the end of that time, the drum is removed from the machine, opened and the contents sieved to separate the parts from the cleaning beads. The parts then need to be rinsed in clean water and dried quickly so as not to rust again. I either use a heat gun, hairdryer or 10 minutes in a hot oven. As a final step I always paint the parts to as close a finish as I can to the original. I simply use red oxide primer and gloss black – the results are seen above.
Sure, maybe they’re not as professional as err, the professionals, but you can make a massive saving this way and save yourselves a lot of hard work on the cleaning wheel or with the solvent. In two years I’ve had no problem using this system so I hope it helps Ridertips readers out.