Featured Project Fuligin

"I put on the cloak... the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark."
-Gene Wolfe, <i>The Shadow of the Torturer</i>

Project Fuligin is my mild custom remake of the stock 2006 Bonnie I bought back in may, 2018. The idea is to improve the aesthetics and make it appear "blacker than black" by contrasting chrome bits here & there with gloss black. There will also be some performance improvements.
The (not quite) Black (enough) Bonnie on the day I transported it back to my humble casa.


The first step was to replace the original, twelve year old, cracked & gray tires with a new set of Bridgestones, and the all-chrome, much criticized rear shocks with a set of black-spring Ikons.

And the hideous chrome wart of a headlight shell with a gloss black unit from Dime City Cycles in Florida.



So now I have this.


The Norman Hyde headers, toga silencers, M bars, low profile mirrors, Lucas-style taillight and shorty turn signals will arrive later this month.

 

Not until the chromies rust out. Expensive, them buggahs, and there ain't anyone on the island who can do a proper job of lacing wheels.

 

A short update -- I've been waiting for the NH header pipes, AI removal kit, and NH toga silencers to arrive. I heard from sherri@newbonneville today & she said that they are on the way.
The project is complicated by my distance from civilization. I don't want to do any jobs at home that might, at some point, require a mechanic & shop to fix my screw up. The nearest motorcycle shop is 25 miles from my house. If I break something I can't fix, I have to borrow a truck & haul the thing into a shop in Hilo. I am worried about the header replacement, for example. I've heard tales of snapping a header mounting bolt & needing it drilled out & helicoiled.
I'm not bad with a wrench, & I have a bike center lift, but I do not have a home machine shop.
So hopefully in a few weeks I'll have the new headers & togas & will have some new pics. I've read different things about the need to rejet the stock keiheins after eliminating the cat converter & replacing the stock silencers with Norman Hyde Togas. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has done this with an air cooled, non-EFI Hinckley Bonneville. I'm also interested in any thoughts about what kind of performance I can expect with the new exhaust setup.

 

It's hurricane season. I think all the food has been scoured from the store shelves & cached away. There is always boar hunting. Old school Polynesians here do it with a spear & dogs.

 

I checked a rattriumph thread on removing those pesky header bolt nuts. The advice was to use a multi-day treatment of penetrating oil, followed a bath with torch flame, followed by a whack with a hammer, followed by an attempt to remove the nut with a socket with a socket using a short-handled lever. If you break the stud, off comes the head to be sent to a real mechanic (presumably after you have snapped off the other studs).
Yuk. Harrowing. Better to pay a (local) mechanic US $100 & let him take the risk.

 

This sounds like good advice. What kind of penetrating oil did you use? Something available from an auto parts store, I hope.

 

You might like it up here in Volcano. It's a bit like blighty up here at 4,000'. Over a hundred inches of rain each year, highs in the 70s in the summer, 60s in the winter. It can get a bit chilly at night in the winter months, down to 38 deg. a few years ago.

 

I heard about the ATF/acetone trick a few days ago, but I thought it was a crazy thing, like putting cow magnets around your fuel line to increase the mileage. Very well, I shall give it a try, but I won't spray it anywhere near my painted parts. I'll brush it on instead.

 

Aloha, Mickey Mouse!
Getting rid of the Mickey Mouse ear mirros:




The new mirrors are an after market item for some kind of Harley. A Road Glide, or maybe it was Super Glide, or Sex Glide, or Super Lube, something like that . I had to use a pair of adapters, made by Joker, I think, to fit the stems to the mirror-holes. Got em all on Amazon. I just don't like bar-end mirrors. I had to use my burglary tools, eh, I mean a pair of bolt cutters, to nip the bottom 3/8" off of the threaded stem on the new mirrors. As-is, they were too long & I couldn't properly tighten the capped hex head bolt that holds the mirror stem in place.

 

Yeah, I think that triumph made a genius move in bringing back a classic style to the Bonneville. But they have also made terrible mistakes in styling with the little bits -- tail light, turn signals, mirrors -- that I hope to correct.