Recent content by hdscarbro

Other projects have kept me from making any progress on the bike recently. Hope to get back to it soon. All of the fabrication is done. The bike is ready to be disassembled for cleaning and paint. I picked up the upholstered seat today. Here are a few photos with the decals and stripe mockups...

Haven't made any progress recently. I've been sidetracked on other projects and traveling. My plan is to get the seat cover made and then take everything apart for painting and polishing. I hope to get the cover made in the next week or so.

After all of the time playing with paint schemes that follow ridge lines, I've pretty much decided a simple racing stripe is what I'm gonna do. It's a classic design and probably one I won't screw up taping. :) Something close to this is what I'm planning. I also thinking that I might add...

Thanks for the complements. Applied a couple of coats of white primer on the body parts to seal the fiberglass and to allow me to see areas that need more attention before paint. I used white primer because I am planning to do a black and yellow paint scheme. Yellow doesn't cover gray primer...

I love center stands and would never remove one from a daily rider. They make any maintenance easier. On this bike, both the center and side stand needed work. Center stand before relocating the "foot arm" to make it line up with the crease in the muffler designed to accept the "foot arm"...

The seat pan was made by first covering the seat area with masking tape and giving the tape several coats of wax. Four layers of fiberglass were then added and allowed to cure. After curing, the pan was removed and trimmed. With the pan in place 6 holes were drilled through the pan and seat for...

A while back, I posted photos of the seat with the extended tail and received several suggestions for refinement: The front of the seat should be shaped to blend with the gas tank where the two The seat tail looked awkward because the shape and integrated license plate bracket didn’t...

I haven't tried riding the bike yet, so I can't state with certainty that it's accurate, but am not expecting there to be any problems. I've exchanged speedometers between Yamaha models before without problems. For example, I put the speedometer from a Yamaha DT1 Enduro on my SR250 cafe and...

I mounted the speedo and tach from a 78 XS400 on my 82 XS400 Seca. It's my understanding the speedometer on most Japanese bikes operate at the ratio of 2240 rpms = 60 mph. Look here for more photos of my Seca project.

I'm thinking of trimming the bottom of the seat. Which looks better: Picture A or Picture B. Picture A: Pencil marks show roughly the trim line. Picture B: Ignore the slight curve on toward the back of the seat, I meant for the line to be straight, but the electrical tape didn't...

You guys are probably right about fiberglass not being stiff enough to prevent fork flex. However, I'm going to reinforce the fender with 6 additional layers of fiberglass because it's quick and easy. I'll do a metal fork brace or replace the forks if flex proves to be a problem for me and my...

Thanks for the caution. I think I'll go ahead and layup 5 or 6 rectangular pieces of fiberglass in a "U" at the fork mounts. Combined with the fiberglass already in the finder, it should be pretty darn stiff. Easier to do now while everything is rough and unpainted.

Made some progress recently on the seat. I didn’t like the look of the Lucas Style taillight mounted directly to the back of the seat. Having the taillight tipped upward looked “shade tree” to me, so I fabricated a brackets into the seat for both the taillight and license plate. After seeing...

I wasn't planning to do a fork brace. I did consider it after noticing that the original fender has a steel brace mounted underneath. If it proves necessary, I could do something similar on my homemade fender. Since the fender is fiberglass, I'd probably just add several more layers of...

Finished up the front fender that I made a while back. The roll of tape and socket are what I used to layout the rough trim lines on the fender. After the fender was trimmed, I made a paper template of one "quadrant" and used it to refine the other three. To get the fender mounted straight, I...