gettin' naked

so i removed the carbs today. i plan on giving them a thorough bathing, a re-jetting, and probably everything short of a prostate exam so they're running quick and smooth on the rebuild.  i did have one problem, when i swapped out those vintage lawnmower handy-bars for the wicked awesome clip-ons, the throttle cables turned out to be so cramped that my throttle was really hard to twist, and when i did, it'd stick...for a minute i thought about leaving it that way, for the sake of convenience on the road (cruise control!), but decided against it and pulled the throttle cables off.
i spent some time browsing the innerwebs for custom-cut throttle cables and didn't really find much...bummer.  so, i brought the cables home with me and sat out on my front porch swing staring at them for about an hour before i decided to go for it and cut the damn things down myself.  i stripped off the outer coating with a utility knife, made an incision like a friggin' surgeon and peeled it right off.  easy.  under that is the wound flat steel that looks to be at least 1/16th inch thick...that wasn't getting cut with the wire snips, so out comes the dremel. after very very carefully cutting around the inner housing (i previously measured all this out, btw, i didn't just grab the cable and start cutting, damn) until it was free, cut the inner plastic liner with the utility knife, and it all slipped right off.  this, of course, is after i snipped the barrel off the end of the cable....i have an idea of how to re-attach the barrel.  and that's really the only challenge left.  i need to pick up some silver solder this week before i can finish up and try them out.  i'm going to drill out the barrel, slightly larger hole than the cable, wrap the end of the cable with super thin copper wire, insert it into the barrel, then melt some silver solder down into it to [hopefully] hold it firmly in place.  we'll see.  and rest assured, i'll post about how it turns out.