Day Two -- Basics
Some additional progress occured on the second day, but not a ton. I changed the oil and the oil filter. Old oil was definitely at the tail end of it's life and the old filter was quite rusted on the outside indicating to me that it was from back in this bike's Hawaii days (2004 or prior). Oil and filters are cheap so I swapped them.
Here's some pictures of the bike as it sits today in the garage along with some info:
Here is the bike as it sits now. Not all that impressive. A bunch of things removed from it and what not to get simple access to everything. The big plastic gas tank sure does the trick. It's safety wired on and I can probably get... 1.5 gallons of usable gas in that puppy!
For those interested in the Kawasaki Vulcan 500 emissions removal (SEO friendly text), it's really simple. Just remove it all (and don't mistake the thermostat housing for being part of the system) and then hit up the hardware store and get a wide variety of rubber plugs in close sizes. Find the ones that fit the snuggest, warm the bike up so it all has a chance to expand and then jam it all in there. The bike will cool down and they'll be in there nice and good! Very simple and easy to do. Emissions removal on EX-500's and vulcans is renowned for reducing lean popping on deceleration, and in my case the system had failed and was just leaking air right into the intake causing the right cylinder to run ungodly lean. Lucky I didn't blow anything up... I hope!
The forks had big rust splotches on them when I got it, so I attacked it with 0000 steel wool and WD40, and I got them down to near nothing, but... there's still scoring that will surely cause issues with seals. Then again, how much travel do I actually have up front? If it's just 5" or so at most I'd like to think I won't actually reach the score section of chrome fork leg... Oh yeah, and check out how rusted over the horns are! I need to see if they're getting voltage even, but it looks to me like they're deader than dead!
The tank is surely the big headache in all of this. The rim of the tank inlet tells it all... rust and metric shit tons of it. The gas has chunks of rust floating in it. The tank is REALLY bad. The game plan is to first try and pressure washer it out to get out as much big chunks as I can followed by drying it out. From there... I saw a youtube video of a guy who attached a gas tank to a low speed drill and then filled it with rocks. I'll be using nuts and bolts thank you but the concept will be the same. leave the gas tank full of them spinning around for 2-3 hours or so as it bashes off all the surface rust it can get at.
From there, assault it with the POR-15 kit, and hope I've got a close enough to good tank!