This bike was a goner when it first came to me. The engine wont start and had several missing and damaged parts. Most of the parts are good and all it needed was a bit of work and some TLC.
I think that this is one of the most easiest bikes to do a frame swap. No special skills and special tools needed. I also did a frame swap on the ZZR on the background (have done 20+ ZZR frame swaps...) but I'd rather do Estrellas than ZZRs any day :)
Because I am too cheap to to buy a lever, I heated it and slowly bashed it using a plastic hammer to make it straight again. I learned this technique riding Trials bikes because my levers often get bent when I fall off a boulder or hit a tree. The problem with non-racing bikes are that the materials used are crap compared to "for competition use only", and hammering the lever on a normal bike can cause it to break. The technique here is to use heat and slowly bash it with a plastic hammer. Unlike Trials race levers that you can bash them without using heat and they still wont break.
Here is the photo of the lever after bashing it several times. I still could straighten it a bit more but I didn't want it to break it so best for me to stop here. The funny thing is after straightening the lever, I found two new levers in my desk that I forgot about. I didn't use the new ones and still have them somewhere...
The sad thing about working on gravel is searching for parts that accidentally fell down. Here I lost three steering head bearing and had to steal the bearings from my other Estrella just to get this done.
The tail pipe was covered with rust and I'm too cheap to buy a new one so I just painted it with heat resistant paint and it looked sexy again.
My son stole the headlight from my dead Honda Steed to replace it's damaged headlight and also overhauled the carburetor himself because he was very eager to test the bike that afternoon, and waiting for me to overhaul the carb will take ages... He got the engine to run, then he bled the brakes, changed the engine oil and took it for a spin. Notice how happy he is with his work :)
