Got a little carried away - time to customize

[bentwrench]

Okay, when we last left our intrepid hero, he had restored his 1983 DOHC XS400 to reasonably good shape. She ran, she was mostly purple, and she was ready for a new rider.

And then she didn't sell. Which is mostly the fault of our intrepid hero, who is not a good salesman.

And the winter was cold (as it is in Canada.) And our intrepid hero got his wife pregnant again. Which got him thinking about what he would want to do to the motorcycle before his second progeny entered the world.

So the bike went from this:

To this:

I'm titling this photo "Don't worry! I have everything under control!"

The project is simple. Take a motorcycle from the early 80s (a period which produced NO good looking Japanese cruisers), and make it look good.

That's it.

Don't worry, i have everything under control! (That statement is so useful!)

Budget for the build is very low, so let's see what happens.

 

[bentwrench]

So today, I addressed the wheels.

Spoked wheels are bad ass. Forged wheels are not. They're heavy. And in the case of my bike, they have a dated swooshy pinwheel pattern. Let's make that less obvious.

We went from this:

So swooshy it hurts.

To this:

My wife forced me to build a painting booth for a small project. So I built one. But I decided it should be big enough to repaint a motorcycle frame. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves...

 

[frwinks]

I enjoyed your last story, so I'm looking forward to this "next chapter"
looking good so far.. and congrats on the baby

 

[bentwrench]

Thanks! New baby is due July 27th, one day before my own birthday, so whatever madness occurs has to be done by then, or I'll forget where everything goes.

I have to go buy some bolts tonight to replace the ones that held on the brake rotor, due to corrosion. Too much salt on the roads in Canada - pics to follow.

 

[frwinks]

did you buy the bolts yet? I have to get longer ones for mine due to the .5" rotor spacer I'm using now. I can pop my old ones in the mail for ya. send me your addy via PM

 

[bentwrench]

Thanks for the offer, but new bolts are about $3, and I'm too impatient to wait for the mail.

Also, here's everything I've ever wanted to know about bolts:

It might seem a little odd that I'm obsessing over bolts when the rest of the machine is a little odd looking. I'm not going for concours level, and I'm not planning on entering any shows. But you see, way back when I was a young (er) man, I snapped a few old bolts, and so now I'm paranoid.

These bolts in particular hold the front brake disc on. The bolts are stainless, and the wheel is aluminum. Add in salt water (because someone rode this bike in the winter here in Canada, which to be fair, I've done on previous bikes. I'll never forget riding on summer sport tires in -20 weather on a raised highway in a snowstorm. Moving on...) and the bolts start growing oxides. So what to do?

My biggest worry is all 6 bolts snapping off at the same time while I'm trying to slow down. Bearing in mind that with my current setup, my top speed is 95 mph, and that may seem a little unlikely to YOU, but I have a habit of beating the odds when it comes to bad luck.

My first thought was to clean the threads.

But that only worked so so.

I could just replace the bolts with something shiny like this:

But the heads are ugly, and I'm not patient enough to find prettier bolts.

Which means trying to fix my current bolts. Now, with my brake bleeder screw, I gave it a hot lemon bath. But this time I'm trying vinegar. After soaking the bolt for a couple of hours, it came out pretty good:

So let's see about it's friends: Everyone into the pool!

I'm heading out to lunch. Some of these are pretty bad, so we'll see how they come up later on this afternoon.

And that's everything I know about bolts.

 

[ThePsuedoMonkey]

Whenever I take out a bolt like that, it just gets the wire wheel and some axle grease!

 

[bentwrench]

The wire wheel is required for other parts of the project. That said, the vinegar did a bang up job:

All right - no more about bolts, I promise.

So, I figured that if I painted the wheels, I should paint and bob and chop parts off the frame, right? Makes sense to me. I'm not going the hard tail look, which seems to be what people mean when they say chopper, but I am chopping parts, so this isn't exactly a bobber.

Let's just call it a custom, or an alt-moto to borrow a phrase from Classified Moto, and leave it at that.

Up onto the operating table with you:

I didn't want to have to strip all the paint. The way this started, I just used a brass wire wheel on the welds that I was going to take off to clean them up for a little more precision. There was rust on the welds (typical for a Canadian bike.) There were also little bits of rust all over the frame, and as I started taking it off, I found more and more blooms under the paint.

My strategy now is to rough up the paint with the wire wheel. If the paint flakes off due to rust underneath, I obliterate the rust with the wheel. I'm going to need to get in the nooks and crannies too, but so far I'm pretty happy with how it's all going.

But there's still work to do:

More to come!

 

[xschris]

Making good progress!

 

[frwinks]

beautiful day to be working outside today... looking good

 

[haga41cat]

I'm enjoying this thread, most amusing keep it up mate

 

[bentwrench]

Hmmm... should I have pointed out that I chopped off the passenger footpeg lumps of metal in the last photo? Sharp eyed readers would have caught that anyway. So I guess I won't.

 

[bentwrench]

Frame is now detabbed and derusted, which leaves me with a question before i can move on to painting and welding (likely in that order... which means painting and welding and painting. I'm hedging my bets - if I can't get this all done before the next kid comes along, I at least want the frame painted and put together, even if there are sharp bits sticking off the sides. This makes sense to my slightly non-sensical mind.)

I have a problem with my bike's butt. There's a lot of metal back there, and I don't want it. I don't want a second seat, and I've removed the rear seat pegs anyway. The moment my girlfriend became the potential carrier of my progeny, she decided she didn't want to ride on the back anyway.

So here's what the frame looks like at the back:

Sorry for the crazy angle. The bike has it's butt in the air, but I wanted to take the picture to show how the bike would sit if it was level.

You'll notice that there's a big metal plate that covers all the rear joints. I'm not sure if this plate is cosmetic to hang stuff off of (you can see the two bolt holes) or if this was a design measure to stiffen up the bike.

Closeup on the joint. The vertical is definitely welded to the horizontal.

So, should I cut off the metal plate? Make it all clean, even though it might weaken the joint? Cut it all off and rebuild the whole thing (not my preference...)

I'm open to ideas.

Also, gratuitous rust shot to show you what I've been wire brushing off all this time:

 

[drewpy]

he he, I bet you showed her the bare frame and said that's where your sitting and she "no I'm not!" sorted

 

[bentwrench]

My wife lost interest in riding when I bounced her off the back of an XV650 going over a set of train tracks that were, um, bumpier than I expected. She held on sideways until I could stop, but never wanted to ride pillion again.

Which is okay with me. The extra weight makes me slower (note to wife: this is not a weight joke at your expense. Your svelte and 6 month pregnant frame is beautiful to me, and will still be beautiful even with stretch marks. Do not hit me. Thank you.)

 

[drewpy]

My wife lost interest in riding when I bounced her off the back of an XV650 going over a set of train tracks that were, um, bumpier than I expected. She held on sideways until I could stop, but never wanted to ride pillion again.

Which is okay with me. The extra weight makes me slower (note to wife: this is not a weight joke at your expense. Your svelte and 6 month pregnant frame is beautiful to me, and will still be beautiful even with stretch marks. Do not hit me. Thank you.)

 

[frwinks]

The plate is definitely a structural gusset, but since you're turning this into a solo bike, I would chop it. How you chop it I guess depends on how you want the ass end to look.
brat look, chop is all off, right behind the V/H welds, bend a new hoop and call it done
cafe look, I would be tempted to incorporate the existing upward swoop into the design, so just chop off the gusset and clean up the round tubes

 

[bentwrench]

Brat look for the seat is what I'm looking for. Hoop metal was found in a garbage heap, I just need to bend it and weld it up. I'll take it off at lunch, and post pics.

 

[bentwrench]

Lunch came early. Gusset and rusty bits removed, and at least one side ground down (believe it or not, I actually have a job as well, and from time to time need to sit at a computer and write stuff to various superiors, so the other side will have to wait for now.)

 

[bentwrench]

There's something to be said for using the right tool for the job, and also something to be said for ingenuity in the face of a big price tag.

I live in an area of Canada where for some reason, there are no metal fabricators. And I needed a hoop for the back of the bike. And I don't like spending money.

My neighbour across the street threw out some hefty lawn furniture - one of those swinging love seat things, so I raided the main support sections for scrap tubing. All of it is a little big (1 inch OD instead of 7/8 inch) but the price was right. Oh, and it's all straight.

I went and visited my favourite exhaust shop to ask for some advice, and while they didn't have any dies small enough to bend the tubing for me, and all of their contacts had closed up shop (seems metal fabrication really is a dying art around here,) they mentioned that maybe a conduit bender would work.

$100 bucks for the tool, cram steel tube into tool, bend steel tube. I couldn't quite get it to the 180 that would be purdy, due to the limitations of said tool (I'll have to figure out how to make that work...) and then return the tool to the store, for a net cost of $0.

Pictures to follow...