1984 BMW R80rt

Hi! Dne’ here! I know, Classic Cars and tools? Motorcycles have been part of my life and will be part of this site!; )  I love motorcycles! However, the bike being dissected in this blog is my oldest brothers’ project~ but he brought it over to my shop cause he knew it would be done well, plus I have TOOLS!  My brother and I love bikes, but he loves Harley’s and different bikes, whereas I love sportbikes, but we both love motorcycles!

The story starts with an ’84 BMW R80rt. The bike came with a fairing, whereas the ST80 does not come with a fairing; maybe more of a sport cruiser. However, Robo (my brother’s name is Robert), I call him Robby. But here we’ll call him “Robo”! He wanted a project bike, and a project he got! and so did I! ; )

Kind of ugly?

Wasn’t long, Robo removed the fairing and “other” unwanted things(all by himself I might add). Here’s Your Truly sitting on his bike.

and introducing my older brother Robo! Tada! Look how proud he is!; )

Now for a story within the story, as this is my beginning also in the involvement of motorcycles!  Robo got out of the Navy in 1973, came home, went to work and first thing he bought was a ’73 Honda CL350~ it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen! I must say the poor bike did receive a beating in its short life and luckily we survived that era!

Though this era in the early ’70’s we may have been considered hippies, we were not hippies, nor flower children!  We were just kids that liked to have fun!

OK, back to the real story at hand~The story is pretty straight forward; take as much apart as we dare, sand, sandblast, replace parts as needed, and paint! and spend a considerable amount of money in parts! Simple! haha!

My involvement? to do this as “correctly” as possible, the bike needs to be torn down, but not removing the engine! My image and Robs image are two different images as to what is to be the outcome of the bike, but it’s his bike, and I follow, but lead the resto-modding of making a nice looking cafe racer, or a nice looking street bike! Of course now my projects are put off for a while, but I needed a break anyway!

That’s me on the other side of the bike. There will be many trips to the BMW store across town before this is over! (Robo made most of the trips, not me)

Look at that old exhaust~ it had some holes in it and sounded funny!

I know it doesn’t look like much, but the bike is torn down pretty far! The front of the bike is being supported by Little Mule II, an un-modified version of My Little Mule, but still functional in its capabilities of being a valuable second hand! 😉

Hanging by Little Mule II

I’m sorry to say I don’t have any photos of the sandblasting process, but it involved making a tent to contain as much as possible of the aluminum oxide media. It still made a mess! lol  Here Robo is taping up things we don’t want to paint.

Another issue that we ran in to, was the steering was difficult to turn, so we wound up taking the steering apart to replace the bearings and races, which could be a blog in itself!

Though it may have not been the correct way to clean up the aged aluminum block and cylinders, we just “lightly” blasted the aluminum and seemed to bring back life to the engine. I was happy with the outcome!

My brother, kind of was asking me to paint the bike’s gas tank, fender, and other parts. I did make a gas tank rotisserie, but wound up being scrap metal! The parts mentioned were painted by a nearby paint and body shop~ I got off the hook!

NOTE: By the way, if one wants to remove the BMW emblem from the tank, just take some thin strong dental floss, slide it behind the badge and make a sawing action and proceed to cut through the adhesive foam that affixes the badge~ it was pretty easy to do. DO NOT USE A SCREWDRIVER TO REMOVE THE BMW EMBLEM! ; )

Here’s Robo hard at work painting the frame. I know he’s wondering if we’ll ever get his bike back together again! ha ha!

The starter cover came out very well!

This is a new set of handlebars, not quite the true cafe racer style, but much better than what was on it! A comfortable sitting posture!

Isn’t this the coolest looking exhaust!

The shocks~ we took them off(of course) and dis-assembled them, painted them to look like new!

I’ll have you to know, installing the new BMW emblems is kind of a testy task! You only get one shot at getting it on straight! If it’s a tad off, it will stay a tad off! I took a long piece of blue tape(like painters use), and placed it across the emblem, and held it up to the recess where it will be, then when it looked OK, Rob pressed it on!

The little video~ I didn’t realize I was going to be posting this~ I’m sorry I didn’t blip the throttle! : (  But I assure you it has a deep sound and not obnoxious!

                             (click here!) The new sound of this BMW exhaust! (click here!)

The original air cleaner box, we did away with it for now. We’re still undecided what we’re going to do here, but in the meantime, this will have to do! ; )

The next set of photos speak for themselves  ; ) “Hey, that’s a nice bike.” which Terminator movie did that phrase come from?

A striking difference to say the least!

From a frump, to a very nice looking street bike!

Happiness!

What’s next? right now at this very moment, this nice looking 1984 BMW RT/ST80 is at the dealer tweaking some things we could not take care of, like fine tuning to run it’s best, maybe some tires~ a new set of tires does wonders!

This blog on my brother’s bike is not over yet! I’ll be posting more photos~ I just wanted to get what I had on the blog! So, subscribe to my Classic Cars and Tools if you’d like to see what goes on next! Until the next time!  ; ) Dne’

Hey, if you should have any questions, you can contact me in the tool bar; )

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