Holysmoke wrote:Duane, you're right, I should write each thread so it can stand alone. That leads to my next question, is it better to have one thread as one goes through the process of bringing a bike bake to life, or to split it up, capturing phases of troubleshooting?
I just grab a loose leaf spiral binder note book from a pile where I ripped out the few pages of some long forgotten project. Now that I am downsizing, I am throwing out many of these.
If it is one that I plan to keep a long time, such as what you are doing. I make tabs for each chapter and just guess where they need to be. Each chapter is done serially. I leave the back half of the pages empty for the unknown aspects that will jump out later on.
I know, some of you will prefer to do it digitally. I hate using a pen now and far prefer the keyboard. How many keep the computer out in the shop running and ready? I think few do. With old fashioned paper, you can scribble easily and that means far less is forgotten.
Take a lot of photos, lots and lots of them. I try to take at least 2 to 3 times what I expect that I will ever need. Still, I always find that something didn't get recorded with a photo.
If this is a project where I don't really know what I am doing, I lay it out in order of being removed. I even take photos of the parts laying on a work bench.
I also start with printed out pages of articles that I found on the Internet. I high light the things that I think that I will need ahead of time.
This must seem obsessive, but I learned this while working in artificial heart research some 50 years ago. It has paid of handsomely for me.
Did I mention that I keep things clean? Especially the surface under where I am working. Don't ask how I learned this one.
Do not believe very much of what you read in officially printed books on BMW motorcycles. None are complete. They have errors and usually not the best and most efficient way of doing the job. I really can't think of a single repair job where we followed the factory procedure. We had better and faster ways of doing it all. Sometimes our method was much slower, but it was what was needed to get the result. Eg, fork alignment, tire installation and balance and the list goes on and on.
My shop had about 10 dealers within 100 miles and not a single one could do a decent job of a simple tune-up. Few even tried to do serious stuff like a transmission rebuild........ thank goodness.
You must learn to do this stuff yourself. I have to admit that I think that the state of the art is better today than back in my day, due to the Internet. At least we have many outlaw shops that do a better job than most dealers.