So last week Chris Newbigging from Practical Sportsbikes posted a request to borrow a mc18 for a 1989 250's group test so I offered him the use of the Terra 18, he snapped my hand off at the offer and mentioned he might even use the 18 for the front cover!

Chris needs the bike next week so this gave me just over a week to do a few little jobs to make her look a bit tidier.

First on the to do list is the left hand lower fairing panel which is plain white and void of all decals. At this point I have to say thanks to Johny Mac who has recently completed his own Terra resto, he has a sticker man who made all the decals for his bike and John had already supplied me with the required SP and Honda decals. John also had his paint man find a colour code for the Terra silver so I could buy an aerosol of the correct paint. Panel was masked, prepped, painted and decals applied!



Next on the list were the front discs, these should have black centres so were removed, masked and painted. Had a nice new set of SP disc bolts and nuts so they were bolted back on with these rather than the corroded originals.



Bike came with a mc21 kickstart fitted which has a different bend to the 18 one and means your foot hits the footrest making it a pain to kickover, once again Johnymac came to the rescue and a deal was done for his spare 18 kickstart. I also swapped the non standard footrests over for a spare pair of oem ones I had kicking around.



Next on the list was the forks, the bottoms were a bit corrode so decided to strip them and have them vapour blasted. If you look at a pair of original fork bottoms they have a grained finish although this doesnt run all the way to the brake lugs and other protrusions that are hard to polish. This is where I went a bit anoraky, masked out the appropiate areas and grained the forks with a scotch brite flapper wheel in a drill and then laquered the fork leg.





The chrome on the fork stanchions was pretty poor with a lot of rust pitting, had a spare pair of 21 sp forks so rebuilt the forks using the 21 stanchions and internals and 18 bottoms. Slipped in some new seals and a blend of 10 & 15 weight oil. Slipped the forks and wheel back in using some of the freshly plated bolts from my track bike, quite pleased with how it came out.



Also painted the top yoke.



Had the silencers vapour blasted to give them an as new finish.



And thats it for the moment, ready to ride down to the Ace cafe tomorrow.