Well, this project slowed down, took apart the motor, here is where i have good news and bad news, the head looks mint, the motor was recently rebuilt as the pistons look newer and are wsm .25 over. so they looked good from the top but when we pulled the jugs there was a problem, looks like the rave valve on the mag side clipped the bottom ring on the piston and the piston had a chip in between the rings, pulled out the rave and yup you can see where it had clipped the ring by the gouges on it, what is weird is one rave valve(pto side) was shaved and the mag side was not. my guess is they replaced the rave for some reason and forgot they had to shave it and thats what caused the damage. Amazingly no damage to the jugs at all. Rotary cover and valve are great. The stator and flywheel look awesome. Now we split the cases, the paint on the cases look rough, so,some media blasting will have to happen to make them look good again, inside looks good no water, no rust, no shavings everything moves freely and spins nicely. We pull the crank, spin each bearing....smooth with no noise. Pull up on the first rod nice and tight, second rod uggghhh wiggle wiggle up and down play. So long story short, need one new wsm piston .25 over and i have a good used crank to thrown in her but a rebuilt sbt crank for $275 would be nice. So for about $350 this thing will be like brand new engine. I will get some pics of the the internals soon. Oh yeah when we pulled the bad piston one of the rings just fell off in 2 pieces, if the dess post didnt fail im sure the guy would have continued running it and we could be looking at catastrophic failure, either the rod failing and blowing out the cases or the rings coming apart on thier own.
I have been working on the new handlebar pad. I wet sanded one from a 96 gtx, filled in the holes where the dess post and choke were. Now it is ready for paint. I will be painting it tonight, and recovering the pad in either black or yellow marine grade viynl. I have black so that is convenient but yellow would really set it off. I have a pad from a 97 xp that was really rough, i tried cleaning it but is beyond saving so that option is out