What's the plan then?

It almost seemed mad, washing such a rusty old thing with a bucket of soapy water. I can't say that it made much difference really, but I did manage to get rid of some of the oily greasy mess. Time to bring out the powerwasher!

I'm sure it DID look better - everything is relative I guess! 

It had been 10 years or so since I'd last stripped a bike down - my previous rebuild had been a 250G5, that eventually got sold on as an unfinished project, when I just couldn't stomach the amount of money I was putting into it, compared to it's value.

I'd already got my head round this one though, accepting that she would always be worth less than she cost, but that I couldn't put a price on the pleasure and satisfaction I'd get from the restoration and, hopefully, from riding and displaying her at the end. OK you're right, I had been assessing in my mind how much it was going to cost and hearing those "ker-ching" noises again and was already trying to justify the expense!

It's worth a quick diversion here - what was I trying to achieve? What was the goal?

I knew that I didn't want it to be a concours restoration. I really couldn't justify the expense and ultimately, I wanted to be able to ride it to and from shows, and hope others would get some pleasure from seeing a relatively rare bike in nice condition, but with no expectation that I'd win anything. I figured that, apart from the expense, if it was concours, then I'd never want to ride it. My vision was for it to end up looking like a really well cared for, 2 or 3 year old bike.

Part of the logic in choosing this bike over say a 400-4 was that it only had 2 cylinders against 4, if the engine needed rebuilding - I figured that would be cheaper, probably correctly, considering how much the carb restoration cost me later on. Also, I still remembered how expensive it had been to rebuild the spoked wheels on my G5. Because the Dream had alloy "Comstar" wheels, I figured they would be much cheaper and easier in that department to restore. Oh how wrong I was in hindsight - more of that later though.