Secafromhell

I'm much more active on the XJ mailing list than I am on the forum, but I thought I would start a build thread on my bike, that included the history of my bike since I got her. She's a 1982 Yamaha Seca that's been affectionately dubbed SecaFromHell. The best way for me to describe this bike is as an irrational, expensive, frustrating labour of love.

History: A few years ago, I had been riding for a few years and decided that I wanted to be able to do my own work, and I decided to learn by buying a cheap wreck of a bike and rebuilding it. The worst that could happen was that I messed up a bike that was already messed up, but the upside was that I would get more comfortable doing my own work.

After a bit of searching, I found a 1982 Yamaha Seca with relatively low kms for $200. It had been crashed, had been sitting forever and a day, and the guy's wife was basically telling him that since he hadn't managed to make the rebuild project materialized, the bike had to go.

It cost me more to rent the van and to put gas in it to get the bike than I paid for the bike, but it was just what I was looking for.



The damage - the biggest problem was that in it's storage, it had become a haven for mice, who had chewed through the seat, and chewed through multiple points in the wiring harness. The front brake calipers were damaged (in that one was missing) and the bike was overall in really rough shape. However, it was mostly complete, and it had a vintage Wolf exhaust.

My initial plan was, over the winter, to get the bike running. No more, no less.

First step - find a manual (check)
Second step - connect with the online community (the xj mailing list).
Third step - hit eBay for parts.

 

My first job is electrical. Never having done any soldering, nor read a wiring diagram, nor done any electrical work more complicated than changing batteries, I'm a noob.

I mean, I'm a huge, honkin' noob. But I'm no dumber than anyone else, so I'm just going to muddle through it. I started by repairing the wiring harness where it was obvious that the mice had broken wires. Any two same-coloured wires get patched up and reconnected. I don't have any pictures, but it was like, in between an amazing amount of pooping (which they left for me to discover everywhere), the mice had not just chewed through the wires, but had eaten a great deal of it. Instead of simple breaks, there were inches of wires that were just gone. In addition I found many more examples of places where the mice had chewed a little bit of the wires, but not all the way through. It was enough that I had to do a continuity test on every wire - every single wire in the harness, and put that wire under stress (wiggle it around every which way I could) to see if it was damaged.

Every
Single
Wire had to be tested, because I kept finding breaks.

Now the smarter of you will ask "Why didn't you just buy a new wiring harness?"

 

Oomis,
Nice build thread. I will follow up and help where I can, and I know other will as well. This is a great site with a great bunch of people willing to help and comment. Some will critizice you, but just take it as constructive critisicim when you get it.

Looks like you have your work cut out for you no pun intended LOL
Those mice are survivors it seems. They sure like to chew and rip things apart. I lived in a house infested with mice once. I like your exhaust. I wonder what it sounds like.

Keep posting photos.

 

Bear in mind that I'm talking in past tense, because all of what I'm posting right now is ancient history. The bike had gone through several transformations, and I rode it 5000 kms from Toronto to Halifax and back last year. I'm just putting up all the history of my trials and tribulations in the hopes that someone else, looking at a wrecked carcass of a bike, will hear my stories and think "it can't be worse than what that guy went through".

 

Ooohhhh, I see now, Cool. Welll, then post more photos, LOL

 

cool beans dude, I would love to see the rebuild and before and after.

Also, I've never heard of a wolf exhaust, im gona go see if they still make them... I like the look

 

That is REALLY a good thought to help new guys (still consider myself in that group :wink: )! "it can't be worse than what that guy went through". Glad you started posting...

skillet

 

Well, that thought occurred to me as well, so off to eBay I went for another wiring harness, for the brake caliper and for a new set of carbs as well. Though I hadn't yet cracked the carbs that came with the bike, I was learning that dirty, busted up carbs are a source of much pain. I figured that getting my hands on a new rack would be a good idea, and so I found a great-looking set in Montreal.

The interesting thing was that I could get the bike to run (briefly and badly) on the old wiring harness and carbs, but with a swap for the new carbs and harness, she just wouldn't go. I had torn apart the new carbs, cleaned them out, verified that everything was in good shape, and the new harness looked like it had no problems at all. Eventually, we narrowed the problem down to a couple of things.

Firstly, the bike just didn't like the new harness. After much (I mean much) testing, we couldn't find very much that was wrong with it. However, as soon as we put the old, wrecked, stitched up harness back on, we got power to the good bits. There was NO WAY I was going to do a wire by wire diagnostic on the new harness as well, so the old one stayed.

Secondly, the new carb rack, well, it looked great, but man did it give us a hassle. Hours were spent ensuring passages were clean, setting float levels, polishing the needle valves, but no matter what we did, there were symptoms of an air leak. The bike would hang at a high idle and would stall. We shimmed the valves, we did a colourtune on it, we even pilfered the best bits from the old carbs and installed them on the new one.

Someone had a brilliant idea - put the old carb rack on with the best bits. It hadn't been cleaned, it looked crappy, but it ended up working. The best we could come up with as an explanation was that perhaps there was some sort of hairline crack in the body of the new carb. Something we couldn't see.

This bike definately wanted to keep all her original bits, I'll give you that.

 

Welcome to the Dark Side, Omar!

Hope all is well with The Listers. I've been waaaayyyy out of touch since messing up my arm in the spring... Just after NOCC.

Ummmm... Back on topic...

Great post! ;-)

 

Long story short, the bike was up and running. After an inaugural run to the Northern Ontario Carb Clinic (and a side trip into a ditch - but that's another story) it was really time to focus on the cosmetics.

A paint job, itty bitty turn signals, ceramic coated exhaust, Napolean bar end mirrors and new gauges, and we have something like this:

 

wow, very purdy, makes me rethink about getting mine painted blue

 

Hi! Uh...who is this? Don't recognize your handle...

 

Sorry... Shoulda introduced myself. John, from Ottawa. MaximX with the fat front tire?

The ceramic-coat on the exhaust looks great! Do you still have the Wolf kicking around?

 

Hi oomis,
My '81 750 came with a chopped up harness. Somebody put the center of the loom on top of that metal "guide" under the tank, which then was cutting wires one at a time. I patched it, but eventually got a perfect one from E-Bay for $15 that included the relays.
Nice looking paint you got there !

 

Very nice, clean conversion! What handlebar and right-hand controls/MC did you use?

 

I do have the exhaust still, it's got lots of surface rust, but it's still solid. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.

and the ceramic coat on the exhaust did look great for a season, but I think that the place that I took it to didn't strip it the way I asked them too, so after a year of being on the bike, rust is actually starting to show through the ceramic. I'm unhappy about that. I'm going to investigate to see if the remaining ceramic can be taken off and the rust underneath properly blasted, and then I might have it redone - properly this time.

 

As you can see, that ridiculous centre-mounted master cylinder was among the first thing to be removed with great prejudice. I then took an angle grinder to the stock controls to remove the lever assembly, and then I mounted a more traditional MC that I found at a salvage yard (I think it might be from an R6) and slapped it on there.

That setup is going by the wayside, though. I have on order left and right hand switch assemblies from MikesXS, and I have the lever perches from an 00 R1 coming in. I also have Pazzo levers to fit those perches. I'm tres excited.

 

At this stage, I also had SS brake lines made up from Paragon. I used a double banjo bolt right at the master cylinder, so I didn't have to run a splitter - just the two lines right down to the calipers.

Speaking of calipers, the anti-dive system came off as well. One side was seized, and since I had rebuilt the forks with progressive springs, the anti-dive was redundant, as far as I was concerned. Off it came. No ill effects.

Oh - the coils, ignition wires and spark plugs came off as well, replaced by Dyna coils and Iridium plugs. No issues riding in the rain for me!

I need to give credit to a couple of the listers as well, without them it would have taken a lot, lot longer for me to come up to speed and to get the work done. Thanks so much, guys.

 

That sucks about the rust under the ceramic. Is the place where you had it done going to anything for you? What kind of money does it take to get the ceramic done?

And if you have no plans for the Wolf exhaust I might know a 900 that could give it a good home...

 

It cost a couple of hundred dollars to do it, and that was a couple of years ago. I have a guy right now that's helping me with the work that I'm doing, and I trust him, so I'm going to give it to him to see if he can help restore the exhaust. I'm not going back to the original company because they're not local, and it's not worth it to me to spend a lot of time travelling to drop the thing off to a company I no longer trust. Why would I give them more money to fix a problem that they caused? And I don't want to waste my time trying to convince them that this is a warranty issue of some kind - they did the work long enough ago.

I'm going to restore the Wolf exhaust, and I am going to put it on to see what it sounds like, and how it runs compared to the stock. At that point I'll make a decision about what exhaust to keep and what to sell. I've never seen another vintage Wolf exhaust either, so I'm leaning towards keeping it.

 

Good that you've got someone you trust working with you.

I haven't seen one of those Wolfs before either, but it's a nice looking exhaust. *Almost* as cool as the vintage Bassani 4-1s. Still wishing I'd bought the one I saw on eBay two years ago...

 

Back in '86 I put a Wolf 4 into 1 Pro Pipe on my Honda CBX 550. It was awesome and I'd buy another one if I could.

 

I confess, at this stage of the build, I was thinking more streetfighter than cafe racer, and getting my hands on a streetfighter style "fairing", the headlight came off and the fairing went on. Also, the bike was ridden from Toronto to Halifax.




(I'm sure I have some better shots of the bike somewhere)

 

Well, that kinda brings us up to date. Everything is working great on the bike, so clearly I have to tear her apart and start over again.

The look with the streetfighter fairing isn't quite what I was looking for, to be honest, I found myself thinking quite often that it looked a little hodgepodge, a little thrown together. Which I would have been fine with, were it not for how rusty and dirty everything was starting to look. From 50 paces, she looked fine, but up close there was plenty of surface rust, and the engine just looked old and tired. Time for a complete teardown, and top end rebuild while I'm at it. One of my riding partners is tired, apparently, of complaining about the blue smoke coming out my exhaust.

Firstly, let's get this puppy torn down.

So far, so good. I've done all of this before, with the exception of the engine removal. Taking out the engine, boy did that ever feel like new territory, but once it's done, it's done. I briefly entertained thoughts of cleaning and painting the engine myself, but in the end I decide to outsource it to a great local guy. This is what I got back:



Pretty.

Next! Where's that angle grinder!

This is what I started with:

First, we start with the brackets that the reflectors are mounted on. I've, uh, never really used an angle grinder before, but how hard can it be? Fine, I'll find a spot to practice first.

Before:

After:


That wasn't so hard! It certainly was fun


Now, onto the back end:

That wasn't so hard either!

And the roughly finished result:


Next, the test fit of the seat pan to see what it would look like



That looks kinda awesome.

 

So to bring us up to date...

...one of the things I never really liked was the tired old switchgear on the handlebars. They were tired, faded and just kinda worn looking.

So off to Mikes XS for new left and right switchgear!

And hey, that Protaper bar and Rizoma risers would look hot too. I just happen to have them kicking around, they didn't work on my FZ1.

Also, new lever perches and master cylinder from a 00 R1 courtesy of eBay, and oooh....Pazzo levers. Let's see how those look!



Actually, they look great, and more importantly they don't hit the tank at full lock.

That pretty much brings us up to date. The rolling chassis is going to be sent out shortly to be redone, so pics and a report when it comes back!