Okay, so I'm going down the rabbit hole. It could get messy. Squirrel!

How do you folks organize a significant renovation? How do you stay ahead of the aircraft, ride the wave, keep all the plates in the air, and other metaphors besides?

Take heaps of piccies, put fasteners in zip lock bags and mark the bag as to what components they are off. And if possible attach the bag to the removed item with zip ties. Mark wiring with masking tape as to what it is off and take more piccies. Don't throw anything out until you are 100% that the replacement item is correct.
Regards Martin.

MartinW wrote:Take heaps of piccies, put fasteners in zip lock bags and mark the bag as to what components they are off. And if possible attach the bag to the removed item with zip ties. Mark wiring with masking tape as to what it is off and take more piccies. Don't throw anything out until you are 100% that the replacement item is correct.
Regards Martin.

A very large +1 on Martin's advice. Ziploc bags and a Sharpie pen are your most important tools when you are taking your bike apart.

Invest in a jug of S100 motorcycle cleaner and a pile of sponges and various size chip brushes. Spend an hour or so before you start taking the bike apart to do a good clean with the S100. Take the tank, the seat and the radiator trim off and clean everything under and behind them. Then when you take a part off, clean it again to get the dirt that evaded the first cleaning. Clean parts are much easier to inspect for damage and make working on the bike so much more pleasant.

And there's something theraputic watching a clean bike emerge from a pile of sh!te

Ideally with your mates a few beers lots of good humour the job becomes a joy  HOPEFULLY 

After all its supposed to be FUN

Your friends must be more methodical than mine. I can envisage a garage full of jovial buds with ADHD tearing stuff off the bike and leaving it spread in disarray all over the garage. You'll have the bike apart in an hour with no idea of where anything is or where it was on the bike. Unless you have a couple friends with obsessive compulsive disorder, it's better to do the disassembly alone with no distractions, taking your time.

Reassembly, on the other hand, is a whole other thing as long as you can focus on the task at hand and manage your assistants while the party rages around you.

This is all brilliant!  Thanks so much!

I do typically wear a sharpie in my overalls pocket, next to my Fisher Space Pen and a voltage sniffer and a slide rule (j/k about that last..)  And while I can set myself down to almost obsessive tidyness, it's sooo easy for me to

Ooh, coffee...

LOL! I hear you.

And,... I still have my Yellow 10" Pickett slide rule in the red leather case from engineering school though I can't remember how to do much more than multiplication on it anymore.

Only let anyone help that can use one of these. 

My dad used these before pocket calculators came in, a circular pocket slide rule. He left them to me.

Kids think they are so smart but its fun to take this thing out and challenge them to use it. 

E6B  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B

Suspect BobT had to learn to use one of these too.

Pretty much anyone learning to fly before, say, 2000 did.
The wind correction calculator on the back not only gave you a number but helped you grapple with the notion of crabbing..

Sailing, dead reckoning and an RDF used to be such fun. But using Satnav only takes out the instinct for error. Round Island and Ushant for some reason are in my head forever.

I do still have a slide rule on my desk. As in I still have a desk.

Decades ago I got an abacus. 

Back then I was a building estimator and after practicing some maths helping techniques (on company time) would usually know the answer before pressing the equals button on the calculator, but only for certain numbers, luckily common ones.  

Back then I could also shuffle a deck of cards and memorise the order, using memory helping techniques.

So I thought if I learn the abacus and combine it with memory helping techniques, that would be a huge improvement for me with mental arithmetic.

It's still on my To-do list.

daveyson wrote:Decades ago I got an abacus. 

Back then I was a building estimator and after practicing some maths helping techniques (on company time) would usually know the answer before pressing the equals button on the calculator, but only for certain numbers, luckily common ones.  

Back then I could also shuffle a deck of cards and memorise the order, using memory helping techniques.

So I thought if I learn the abacus and combine it with memory helping techniques, that would be a huge improvement for me with mental arithmetic.

It's still on my To-do list.

I do that too, love the maths in it. Impresses guys if you can look at along list of calculations and say the total is incorrect just by looking at it. Mental arithmetic is not even taught any more.

In school one of our teachers taught us Latin and maths. But this guy was a total genius and taught us how to multiply using an abacus, something the Romans did not use it for.