minor update, stole a couple minutes to myself....

Fresh bars that aren't tweaked, skinned down levers, crap bar-ends and equally crap budget turn signals

Got rid of that ridiculous grab bar/rack/box combo for this junk. One hacked up xs650 fender, some rubber mounting and more crap budget lights.

So I needed this fender to flex down just a bit as the OE seat base hangs down pretty far. The simplest solution I came up with was to add rubber bushings under the fender and some large washers. The nuts were tightened until the fender was firmly held in place but still able to bend down just a bit. As soon as you put the seat down the fender pops right back up. The extra nuts are there to lock the setup in place. (Rube Goldberg woulda been proud of some of the initial attempts)

Here you can see the fender pushed down about 1/2" at the end, not bad. Before this goes back on the road this spring I'll add an aluminum splash guard to the subframe to keep tire shit from flinging up into the works.

This is also about point where I found all the bad wiring "repairs" from a previous owner. I found the mess purely by accident, you see the bike in lovely condition for a stock 30 year old scoot, almost no rust (did find one spot on the rear drum adjuster), nicely rebuilt engine etc, so I really didn't feel like I needed to check under the tank. 

oops.

The wiring is haggard and it's even worse inside the headlight bucket. Obviously the guy who did the upkeep was good at everything except wiring. Honestly it's not my most confident endeavor either, though I've decided it's because of the hieroglyphic goddamned service manual wiring diagrams. 

..but that's for an upcoming installation (so to speak)