Stripping Down...

So, my friend Sneaky Pete bought a new house with a nice big garage. It's funny cause the house he ended up buying is the same house my brother used to own a few owners back. The garage was nice and big and perfect for Chopper Charlie to take his chop build to the next level. And let me tell you, I'm all about stepping it up in everything I do ever since my favorite band, Spinal Tap, had those sweet custom amps made back in '84 that went to 11 instead of maxing out at 10.
These awesome amps inspire me to take it to the next level whenever possible. The way I see it is choppin my bike in the back yard was me at 10, but moving the build inside Sneaky Pete's garage was like ripping that knob up to 11 and letting it scream! My friend has about 4 of his own bikes in there but he managed to make room for one more.
The plan is a complete ground up build, so every last piece, bold, screw and wire is coming off the bike and either getting cleaned, modified, replaced, painted or just scrapped. I took the gas tank, carburetor, tail light and seat off, and now wanted to strip off all the wiring.
I know absolutely ZERO about wiring. In fact, I know pretty much nothing about motors or welding or anything whatsoever about building or chopping a bike. But, like everything else on this project, I'm just going to use the interweb and a bit of trial and error and teach myself everything from scratch. So after about 30 hours of interweb research and reading about wiring I started in to strip it down. Here's a great online source for bike wiring, it's long at about 90 pages, but it's bang on for a learner like me, www.btinternet.com/~jhpart/bkwirec.htm. For now all I am doing is removing everything, the hard part will come when I have to wire the bike back up. There is about a billion wires on the stock bike, including safety relays and a thousand feet of wire for one freaking light bulb, with safety relays on top of safety relays. I mean seriously, there is actually some kinda huge safety relay thing taking up space and wasting wire so that a light comes on to warn you that your high beams are burnt out. How about getting rid of that and just being able to notice if the high beam is working or not when you turn it on by USING YOUR FREAK'IN EYES TO SEE! Anyway, I want to strip all that crap off and when I rebuild it I'm only having maybe 2 or 3 wires to just run a headlight and a tail light, and a couple of wires for the few things that can't be gotten rid of, like the regulator/rectifier and the starter, and maybe the neutral switch. So you don't know what a regulator/rectifier is? Yea, me either, but I learned myself up on it and now I do, and I need to keep it. Here's just some of the mess that I'm starting with and a wiring diagram of the stock wiring that looks like a bowl of spaghetti. This is JUST the wires that were jammed into the headlight cover.
Of course, I'm going to need to know what wires do what and go where for when I'm trimming it down and wiring it back up, so I got the wiring diagram and traced and labelled every wire. This is only something I recommend if you have about 30 hours to waste and love getting really pissed and frustrated.
A few posts ago I had mentioned the safety kick stand switch wire that was the cause of the previous owner having trouble getting the bike to started and causing him to give up on the bike. Well, here's that safety kick stand switch wire. I think someone told him duct tape fixes everything, so he had put some on the frayed wires. It didn't work for him, and the bike then sat for 5 years in his shed. Now I have the bike, the kick stand switch is in the garbage can, and the bike starts.
After having all the wires and relays and other crap labelled they were all stripped off the bike, and it was pretty much down to just the frame, motor and tires. Oh, and I drained the oil.
Next I took out the starter motor and removed the rear tire, the chain and the swing arm. All that's left to come out is the motor.

Well, that's it for now my Chopper Charligans. Thanks for reading and also a big thanks for letting me know you're reading. Sometimes I wonder if anybody is even checking this blog out , but at least a couple of times a week someone mentions to me that they've read it or ask me how the chop is coming, so thanks to everyone. Leave a comment if you have something good to say or even just a shout out. If you have something negative to say about me or my blog, well, don't, and screw off. Chopper Charlie is all about good vibes and positive energy only. Of course, if you have something bad or negative to say about someone else besides me, then by all means throw it up in the comment section and we'll all have a good laugh...well, all of us except the person we're dogg'in.