Steering toward the Hills

Decided with the forks off, the handlebars off, I would repack the bearings on the steering head. I was shocked to see that my 1973 actually used loose ball bearings in a open tract system. I loosened up the main nut on the steering head and then the fork nut. You have to use a special wrench which I had in my 2000 BMW R1100RS onboard toolkit. Got luck.

After pulling all the hardware off, it revealed a gunky set of 18 ball bearings. I quickly popped the off, and dropped the lower triple tree to find the other 19 ball bearings.


I then proceeded to clean everything in Gunk and wipe down the inside of the head surfaces.

I went ahead and smeared lots of Moly Grease in the bottom tract, reinstalled the 19 ball bearings, and pushed it up through the steering head, then repeated up top for the other 18 ball bearings.




Here is a picture of everything re-assembled and loosely tighten, I will re-aligh the triple trees once I get the forks installed.