Total, utter novice '97 M900 beer fuelled rebuild thread...

[LouSCannon]

So after almost 10 years of being a proud member of the club I guess it's about time I posted up my own build thread...

The bike in question has been in the club a fair while, previously owned by Gordon H I nabbed it off him I think about three years back always with a mind to to spend a little time and money getting her spruced up. Nothing major every needed doing with her, purely cosmetic, and has run well before the project started. Personally I feel having an original M900 sitting alongside my track Panigale and Sunday toy Scrambler Cafe Racer is a garage to be proud of!

I've a rather busy life, so this project was always going to be hard to fit in around it. I have a friend locally who's rebuilt a few Jap classics in the past and has a better equipped garage then mine so I dropped Bertha (Yes, her name is Bertha) off there a couple of months back and we've been finding late nights once a week to drink beer and take stuff apart.

Also bear in mind I'm very much a technical novice. Handy round the house with DIY, a dab hand with computers, cameras and not too bad with electrics my revision for this project consisted of building a plastic V-Twin engine model kit a couple of years ago. I've very much been more a fan of paying money to those who are vastly more experienced and capable then I to do things.

I'm posting the following just after dropping the engine out last night... "But why drop the engine out if it's just cosmetic stuff" I hear you cry?! Well, turns out the very first thing we noticed was a loose cylinder head nut, which turned out to be a known issue with the cylinder head studs snapping on that era of Monster.

Rather amusing on another thread in 2011 Gordon H did in fact comment that perhaps he should get around to replacing the studs given the known issue and the age of the bike... oh if only! Still, it's been fun learning how to do all this.

The timeline for the build could be an age, glaciers will move quicker then this thread will. Maybe on or two evenings during the week is all we tend to get to progress this.

OK, so that's the introduction, a few picture posts to follow this to show the suits of the last few nights of work so I have what could well turn out to be an absolute money sink and disaster (Albeit a good learning experience) documented for posterity on the internet archives...