Here's how everything is starting out! You can see that the bike is completely broken down. My father-in-law helped a great deal by cleaning, sanding, and painting primer on the body, fenders, and painted items. Here you can see the front fork assembly, front fender, and body have primer and are ready to paint. Some of the chrome and aluminum items in this picture are featured in more detail to show the restoration process that I'm going through. Here are more pictures.
One of the first things I started working on the bench with was cleaning up the Fuel Cock. It was in pretty bad shape when I started, but turned out surprisingly well once I was done.
Here are some of the small chrome and polished aluminum pieces that I cleaned up after being stored for almost twenty years.
The wiring harness for this bike is very simple, and the electronics even
more so. Only one in-line fuse for the whole bike! One of the
oddities of bikes in this era is the use of Selenium Rectifiers to convert
the AC voltage generated by the alternator into DC so it can be used to
recharge the battery and supply DC to the rest of the bike. 
This is
what it looks like.
Clicking on the photo will take you to a page I found that explains in
better detail how rectifiers work, and rectification in general.
A new addition to the shop makes it much easier to clean and restore some
of these motorcycle parts. It's a Sand Blasting Cabinet - shown here!
This really makes it much easier to prepare many of the pieces for painting, and also gets into all the nooks and crannys, particularly between the cooling fins on the block and the head to ensure a strong bond for the paint. The abrasive material isn't really sand, since silica sand is rather dangerous, but I use a blend called speed bead that is actually about 75% glass bead and 25% Aluminum Oxide, (the same stuff used on sandpaper). It cuts rather quickly, and leaves a nice satin finish just perfect for painting.
Here is the sidecover on the right side of the bike that covers the battery. It's painted white, and as you can see, it's not in very good shape. I already removed the knob from the top, and the rubber stops on the inside. Below, you can see the backside of the sidecover before any sandblasting.
Below you can see some stubborn rust with white paint. At this point, the sandblaster was having difficulty with this. So I turned to a chemical rust convertor to treat the rust.
I left the chemical treatment work overnight, and in addition to taking care of the rust and pitting, I returned the side cover to the basting cabinet and the white paint came right off! As you can see, now I have a glass-beaded surface, which I wet-sanded a bit, ready for primer!
Now you can see both sidecovers naked, ready for primer!
The chain guard was the next challenge. After filling in some of the damage with a Wire Feed welder, I began the process of sanding and shaping it. The filler you see below is actually JBWeld! Since the metal was blasted in my blasting cabinet with glass bead there were no issues with the JBWeld bonding to the metal.
