Reassembling Front End, Rear Subframe & Shock

Making a start on reassembling some of the bike, the rear shock, subframe and clip-ons were due for a revisit. The rear shock body had already shown enough of its old age and the blue spring didn't fit anywhere with the intended final colour scheme. All three had one thing in common and that was surface rust, so I worked on removing that first and then moved on to paint. The rear shock is pretty hopeless performance wise but I'll leave that for now.

A poly flap disc removed almost all the surface rust from the subframe and clip-ons, and returned the blue spring on the shock back to bare metal. To get to the pitting and dirt on the shock body I used a sisal buffing wheel which managed to clean the majority of the exposed area under the spring.

For paint I chose "Charcoal Metallic" by White Knight which will hopefully keep it lowkey and match with the final fairing colour. 4-5 coats of base put down and then coated in another 2-3 layers of clear.

Might as well be productive waiting for the coats to dry, oil and filter change for the JZX 🚗

While polishing the frame at some stage I took a break to polish up the top triple too. Once the clip-ons had dried the front end was all good to be reassembled, firstly regreasing the head stem bearings before moving onto bolting the top triple, clip-ons and forks in place.

Next was reinstalling the rear shock and bolting on the subframe.