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The Lone Sabre

45K views 174 replies 27 participants last post by  SabreV45 
#1 ·
Well, I've had a lot of fun watching your guys' project bikes unfold, so I thought I'd post mine up. It's going to be a fairly slow build as I'm going to be taking all winter to finish it. It started as a 1984 Honda Sabre VF700S that I picked up about a year and a half ago for $1300 in great running condition. This is my first and only cycle and the thing is great.

Here's how it looked when I bought it.



I did a little bit to it over last winter, but not much. I have a big list of plans for it this winter. By the way, the flash on the camera makes everything look in much worse condition than they actually are.

Here's how it sits right now.



You can kind of see the first rough mock up for my new gauge mount in the pictures, I'm using the same idea that BuellCafe used and mounted twin round gauges on the side of the tank. I'm planning on using my stock gauges for this.

Here's a view from the top of how the rough mock up looks right now.


One of the things that I did over last winter was to repaint the wheels. I'm planning on keeping them the same for this winter. It is the stock style that the wheels were painted in, but I painted the machines edges gold to go with the color theme of the bike.



Next comes the engine. The transmission died from my stock 700cc engine that was in it, 5th and 6th gears were worn down a lot and the shift fork for 1st and 2nd was worn and warped. So, instead of buying a new transmission for it, a buddy of mine happened to have a spare engine with a excellent condition transmission in it that I bought off him for less than I could buy a transmissoin for. It is the engine out of a 83, which is when they still had the 750cc engines in them, so I'm going to be putting the larger engine in there.

Here's the engine waiting a good degreasing with S100 and possibly a paint job if needed.



I already have the heads off of them which are waiting a port and polish job.



If you didn't notice my post in the Photoshop forum, here's the quick chop I made of what I am planning on doing to it this winter.


That's all I have for now. I'm planning on getting some small parts painted tomorrow.
 
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#33 ·
I picked up the pcb's that I needed for my taillights on my way home from class and spent awhile getting them all wired up. The boards are only about the size of a credit card. The way I'm going to wire them up is so that they both are dim for running lights, they both get brighter for brake lights, and they flash independently for the turn signals, the same as a car with only one taillight bulb per side.




They aren't very big, but they are very bright.



My ignition switch finally showed up last night too, so I got that all wired up. I'm using a wireless switch which I wired up to a latching relay setup I built, which will be wired into my kill switch. This way, I can turn the ignition on simply by hitting the on button, but the bike will not turn off if I accidently hit the off button. The only way to turn off the ignition will be to turn off the kill switch.
 
#34 ·
So I was having problems gluing the pieces of ABS to make the housing for the gear indicator leds. I talked to one of my MDT professors and he is letting me rapid prototype the part in ABS using our Dimension SST 1200es 3D Printer. Hopefully the part will be printed and out of the wash to get the support material off by this weekend.

I designed the part with a small counterbore around all the holes for the leds so that the led holders that I am using will sit flush with the top. I also put in two tabs with holes in them so that I could easily just rivet the housing onto my tach to secure it, no need to find a strong glue to hold it. Here's the part that I drew up in SolidWorks to get printed.
 
#35 ·
Just got my gear indicator led housing out of the bath and it's all formed and all support material has dissolved. This thing is awesome and should work great! The surface is slightly textured because it prints in .01" layers but it's nothing a little bit of fine sanding won't take care of. The small black thing in the pictures is one of the led holders I'm going to be using. I brought it with me so I could test if my counterbore was right and it sat flush with the top, which it does perfectly.


Also brought my tach housing with me to do a test fit with that and it matches the curve perfectly.
 
#36 ·
Kept working on the tach and led gear indicators. The tach and gear indicator housing are pretty much ready for paint now. I cut the tach housing so I can rivet the gear indicator housing in place and cut a slot where I can run the wires through. To figure out where I needed to drill the holes for the rivets, I brushed some liquid electrical tape on the gear indicator housing and placed it on the tach and let it dry for a little bit. When I pulled it off I had nice dots where the mounting holes needed to be.


I drilled out those two spots and the holes lined up perfectly.


I also cut out a slot where I could run the wires for the leds through, just drilled a couple holes and cut out the material in between them with a Dremel.


I also painted a bunch of parts, I painted the majority of the parts that will be gloss black. Here they are on my super high tech painting rack.


Here's the mufflers.


The clamps for the clipons.


The headlight mounts :)skully: was helping me paint)


And the exhaust collector.


After the paint cured I pieced together the entire exhaust just for the fun of it.
 
#37 ·
The gauges are nearing completion. I just got everything painted last night. I did them in satin black. The only thing left is to install the leds into the housing, rivet the housing onto the tach, cover the circuit board with liquid electrical tape and mount it in the bottom of the tach.


Also started working on cleaning up the headlight bucket. Last winter is when I started this headlight. It started out as some old 7" Jap light, but I had to lengthen the back of it to accommodate the Nissan Murano bixenon HID projector. This is where I left it last year (but was painted black).


I started laying down some fiberglass to help clean up the back end of it. It's pretty smooth, but needs a little more glass and some filler. Here's what it looked like after the first sanding last night.


Craig also stopped by last night to drop off the top triple that he was welding for me. The welds look amazing and should grind down very smooth to clean up the top very well.
 
#42 ·
It really is, looks cool and has awesome output. I can actually see the deer now! :rock:

Scrapyard said:
Cool project. Lot of nice little touches. very cool stuff. That's awesome that you have access to a rapid prototype printer. I would pump out so many random parts with one of those at my disposal. Bike is coming along real well though. It's nice that you're giving everything attention along the way.

The Saber was one of the first bikes I ever rode. My buddy had one in high school. Suprisingly powerful and well manered bike for the time. He could wheely that thing for blocks.
Thanks Scraps. I love being able to use the 3D printer. I'm lucky too because my teacher let me do it for free because when they bought the printer they got 3 years of free material.

The Sabre is a pretty awesome bike. It's not as agressive as a lot of other bikes, but it can hold it's own. It fits my riding style pretty well, I don't go balls out very often. It's going to have plenty of power now because of the combination of the 750 engine and the 3.40 final drive gearing. The 750 engine usually have a 3.18 gearing which is fine, but the 3.40 unleashes the real power of this engine. Should be a lot of fun.
 
#41 ·
Cool project. Lot of nice little touches. very cool stuff. That's awesome that you have access to a rapid prototype printer. I would pump out so many random parts with one of those at my disposal. Bike is coming along real well though. It's nice that you're giving everything attention along the way.

The Saber was one of the first bikes I ever rode. My buddy had one in high school. Suprisingly powerful and well manered bike for the time. He could wheely that thing for blocks.
 
#53 ·
How does the gear position sensor on your Sabre work? I was looking at some universal gear indicators, they're all programmable and use the speed/rpm ratio to tell what gear you're in. Seems kind of dumb since it wouldn't work while stopped or when the clutch was pulled in. I'd like to fit a real gear position sensor to my bike if possible.
 
#54 ·
This one uses a small sensor that mounts near the gear shift drum and has a pin which sits into a slot on the drum. When you shift gears and the gear shift drum rotates, it rotates the pin on the sensor which grounds a wire. Each gear has a different wire which gets grounded when you are in that gear.
 
#55 ·
So, probably not easy at all to retrofit something like that to a bike that didn't come with one. Dangit.
 
#57 ·
What kind of setup does your bike have for the neutral light sensor? In the 750 engine that I'm using it had the same setup as what I mentioned but only had it setup with one wire for the neutral light. My old 700 engine I'm replacing had the sensor with the wires for all the gears and I just swapped it in. If your engine has a setup like that just for neutral, you might be able to put something like the one I'm using.
 
#56 ·
Finally got the oil gallery drilled and tapped to start my oil mod. I also wrapped the threads with teflon tape and installed the adapter so I can thread on the -4an line to it to run up to the heads. (I know I rounded the corners on the adapter a little, there wasn't much room because of where it's placed to get a good grip on it, so the socket slipped off.)


Started grinding down the welds that Craig did to fill in the holes in my top triple. It's looking really good. Now I just need to spend the time to get the top face as flat as I can then paint it.



Since we were talking a little bit about my Nissan Murano Bixenon HID projector retrofit, I thought I'd show a couple of pics. Here's the projector and bracket I made to mount it into the headlight housing.



And here's a picture of the setup in the housing. The bracket that I made bolts onto the front ring of the headlight and then that ring bolts to the main housing.


A little specs on the projector swap. I'm using a Nissan Murano Bixenon HID projector. I swapped in a replica STI clear lense into it which gives me a sharper cutoff, and I spaced the lense out with three thin cardboard rings which gave me a bright blue/purple flicker above the cutoff. I'm also using a Phillips 85122+ bulb and a Denso Slim ballast from a Lexus. I also modified the high beam of it a little bit so the shield moves more than original so it gives me an extra tall high beam. It's a great setup for riding in the country at night.
 
#59 ·
I worked on the triples today and got them pretty well smoothed out then painted them. I did them in gloss black to match most of the front end of the bike. Here's some pics.




Also got the shop cleaned up and the workbench organized for tomorrow when a buddy of mine is coming over to get the top end of the engine put back together.


My parts engine is taken apart and stored away in the boxes under the workbench.


And here's just a few pictures of the shop cleaned up.

 
#60 ·
My buddy Jerry came down today and we got the top end all put together. We cleaned the mating surfaces down to being almost medical quality clean and smooth. We also removed pretty much all the carbon off the pistons and chamber. This engine is now incredibly clean on the inside. Got the timing all setup and valves adjusted. The outside of the cases are still a little bit dirty, I'm going to be hitting it with some S100 and a pressure washer before putting it in the frame.



Once Jerry left, I got all the lines cut and all the ends installed for my oil mod. Everything turned out great. These lines look so good.



Much to my surprise, the new tires that I ordered yesterday at 11am showed up at 4pm today. I would definitely recommend Jake Wilson if you are planning on getting tires. I got free shipping and they came from the store in Utah to me in Wisconsin in less than one day!
 
#61 ·
I laid down another layer of fiberglass on the headlight and sanded it down again. Then I threw a coat of cheap primer on it to see the pinholes and unlevel surfaces. It looks pretty good, going to need to do a skim coat of filler and knock that down and it should be good.




Also got my bar end mirror in the mail. I'm just using one of the Third Eye bike mirrors.
 
#62 ·
I was test fitting all the coolant pipes onto the engine and noticed a problem. With the coolant pipes on, the T for the oil mod lines is in a place so that the connector for the front heads oil mod line is blocked by the coolant pipe.


So, I cut another piece of hose and made a new line for the rear head that was 1.5" longer, so it moved the T further towards the side of the engine, giving me room to run the line under the coolant pipe. The braided line is rubbing on the coolant pipe a little bit, so before I assemble it for the final time I'm going to put some heatshrink on the braided line where the pipe is so it won't rub.



Since I put that extra 1.5" in the line, it gave me more slack on the main line from the oil gallery so I can get it around the front motor mount easier, without so much rubbing.


I also cleaned up the clutch side cover a bit. The paint was dull and just didn't look good, and the bare aluminum parts were oxidized. So, I took some sandpaper and S100 to it and now it looks just like new.
Before:

After:


I started cleaning up the rest of the gasket surfaces on the engine so I can get this thing reassembled soon. I also have been replacing all the seals that I can and cleaning it up along the way.
 
#67 ·
I managed to get the swingarm and rear suspension bolted up and torqued down. I cleaned everything up before I bolted it down, so the back end is ready to go. I mounted the rear wheels so I could bounce the rear and make sure everything was working, which it is. :thumbsup:


After I had that all mounted, I decided to mock up the triples, forks, front wheel, headlight bucket, clipons, gas tank and one caliper just to get a good idea of how everything is going to look together. I'm really liking it.




I haven't gotten a ton done this week because of my other project that I just started. I started to do a quad-HID projector retrofit for my 00 Eclipse. I bought all of the parts with a little extra money I had from selling the overpriced cold air intake that came on my car and buying a short ram intake for a lot less. :rock: I couldn't stand having all the parts lying around so I started the retrofit. I'm using a pair of clear lense aftermarket projectors which I'm modifying the cutoff shields and color modding them which will be a low-beam / fog light and a pair of Infinity G35 bixenon projectors with a pair of replica FX clear lenses and being color modded. They're going to be mounted in a pair of aftermarket headlight housings which already have a shroud with two circular cutouts which I mounted the projectors to aim through. Here's a couple of pictures just because.

 
#68 ·
I just started reading up on HID planet. I'm glad to see that you did a 7" round with a bi-xenon projector.

Can you get pictures of the light pattern in the bike housing? looking hella awesome pun not intended
 
#69 ·
hella awesome pun not intended
:thumbsup:

I thought this level of humour could only be found by browsing 6dollarshirts.com
 
#71 ·
Dude, I made a fractal math pun earlier today. Of course I got it :shocker:

Now I'm going to get out of sabre's log before he smacks me
 
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