Foam party

Fooled me twice. I tried to use expanding foam to fill the voids in my seat mold, but it just doesn't get hard enough, so now I've torn it all out and have to do it the right way.

With the core of the squishy foam gone I still have to fill the voids so that the mold material wont get sucked into them. I'm going to have to glue blocks onto it.

which means all the glue spots have to be sanded flat

like so

Laminating resin, good stuff, looks like cherry pie filling, smells like ammonia

Seat, abstract, sculpture

Now we wait... and hope it doesn't fall over.

Don't tell the wife

Just bought this for Cinder (VFR)

Very excited! Radial master, radial brakes, clipons included, full brakes (other than the rotors of course)... and gold goes so good with white.

It's not going to be a snap to mount up, steering stem's too long, may not clear the tire at full compression, calipers may be too close together. I think I can make it work though. Only time will tell.

Bear with me

I've already tapped the races into the steering head so I can't show you the full stack, but it doesn't add any height

Old ball bearing stack on the left, new tapered roller on the right... minus the outside race.

The astute viewer will note that I had to use the thin washer (.125) to get the spacing correct.

give her a whack or two... I didn't heat or chill anything, just sprayed the seat down with a good coat of WD40 and got some PVC pipe to direct the pressure.

and she's home...

...and ready to be packed

like this

the upper bearing on the other hand is less than a perfect fit... hopefully I wont have to eat my words, but I don't think it will matter. The seal's kind of silly though.

Before

After

back on two wheels!

bearings are in and she's back on rubber. Maybe my next project should be insulating the garage.

I wanted to post pics with that statement, but Shozu's not cooperating, so without further adieu:

Went together a lot harder than it came apart, everything's tight now... in a good way

When I had Ceasar do my powdercoat I left the masking a little short

so that I could sand a nice clean edge on it

I adore this color combo

tools

And wouldn't you know it, it almost looks like a bike again

I hung the fairing from the fz600 on it just so that I would get used to it with a nose.

Also I would have taken some better pics of it, but the garage is a mess because it's too cold to spend any time out there to tidy it up, and this was literally as far away as I could get without opening the garage door.

Getting your' bearings

Bearings are expensive, and I don't like working in the cold... so I'm moving slow, and moving inside.

These pics were on my good camera so I'll be posting some more soon

Drumroll

Sixtynine's creeping along,

I'm currently working on completing its' front end. I stripped the forks down a while back.

But the latest, which I just completed several minutes ago, is the front drum

I've been working on the outside for a while, I milled the hell out of it and sanded it nice and smooth followed by some etch primer and fill primer. Here's a shot of the etch primer on the inside.

I want all the aluminum to look raw... but perfect. So I'll be shooting it all silver, I'd like to leave it matte, but that's a nightmare to keep clean so I've decided to clearcoat everything.

Primed, sanded, ready for paint

Basecoat

Finished with clearcoat

My favorite color!

It all took a lot longer than it was supposed to, but happy day indeed. I got my wheels back from powdercoat.

I started the stripping process with aerosol aircraft stripper. I didn't have high hopes for it because by their nature aerosols are usually just really diluted and ineffective versions of the real thing. But it worked fantastically for the first bit. I also tried a couple of different paste strippers and eventually decided it was all just too much work and took them to my powder guy and asked him to use his secret (biodegradable) formula which worked brilliantly, but then it was an issue with the pots that he had. His shop is set up to do small panels and electronics boxes so he didn't have anything that he could just soak them in completely. Several days of this went by (he's doing this job for me as a favor so it was back-burner-ed and I wasn't really in a position to push the issue) and eventually I took them back to finish them out in my sandblaster.

I also had to get them back from him because I wanted to sand them down a bit, I removed several casting IDs from the face of the spokes and, as you may be able to see here I smoothed out some casting seams.

I returned them to him last night, masked them up and picked them up this morning.

So exciting!

Took them up to Cycle Gear and had them swap the still brand new tire off the old bent wheel

Sadly though they accidently ordered me another rear tire instead of a front so I've got to wait for the new front to arrive before I can get her rolling again. If I just wanted something simple like a Pilot Power I could have just grabbed one and been out the door... I've always got to have the stuff that no one has ever heard of and doesn't stock.