Mike's Bike is (99.5%) DONE!

I completed nearly everything! I have to make one last trip to Home Depot to pick up one more hex head bolt in 6mmx1.00 thread, since I over estimated the length of one of the needed bolts and need to straighten that out. After that, the only thing left is to source to stainless locking nuts, the kind without the plastic locking insert, since I don't want any heat melting the inserts and allowing the battery tray to drop . . . That would be a bad thing. For sure. Let me show you what I am talking about!

Mockup . . . one of my favorite things. Measuring 2xelventy trillion times, cutting/welding/drilling once. It saves time in the long run!

Here's the battery tray (again):

Here is one of the flanges Dave helped make while I was working on something else:

I had to figure out a way to make those flanges stay on and support the battery tray in a secure manner. Normally, I would try to figure out a way to do so horizontally, but given the low profile and also the requirement to make things easily accessible, I chose to use existing threaded inserts in a clever way.

This is the existing threaded insert:

I simply drilled through the hole with a smaller bit (after centerpunching it to prevent the bit from wandering too much) and ran a tap through the hole and test it with a piece of threaded rod I had:

 Poifect! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

Here is the basic idea:

With that settled, I had to move on to figuring out how to secure the seat pan. Due to my design of the seat pan, I really only needed to ensure that the seat pan would not pop off the frame rails. The locator pieces lock the seat pan longitudinally, so I just had to make it so that the seat could come off fairly easily but not be accidently popped off.

Here is a view from the underside to refresh our memories of what everything looked like.

Hmmmm . . . That elliptical hole of the frame bracing looks pretty suspiciously well placed . . .

What if I made a plate to cover that, with a hole in the center that would be large enough to fit a stud through it, which would be welded on to the seat pan and then secured with a wing nut? Oh look! A suspiciously perfect stud ready to get welded to the seat pan!

I also took the liberty of cleaning up the edges of the curved section of the seat pan so that it was even all the way around.

Shazam! I distracted you long enough to have made a nice looking place from some stainless I had leftover from the handle of the charcoal started I had assembled for my father for Father's Day:

Now doesn't that look swanky?

Closeups are always good:

Back to the battery tray . . .

Here is one of the hex headed bolts.

Why did I bother with bolts? Well . . . I wanted somethign replaceable. I have seen way too many bolts get stripped out and if I welded something in place, it would make things a lot harder to replace in the future. With a bolt, you can simply unscrew it and replace it with another one. I couldn't find stainless bolts in the right size at Home Despot, so this will certainly do for now.

Here is a shot of how the bolt goes through the threaded insert and the hole that I drilled and tapped for the bolt:

I marked and drilled (intentionally) oversized holes (to allow for ease of installation):

Then noted that the "legs" of the brackets stuck up much too far:

I used a chisel point King Size Sharpie (thought I'd be done mentioning them, didn't you? HAH!) to get an approximation of how much I had to trim off. I fired up the band saw and got to sawing the excess off, cleaning them up on the belt/disc sander and ended up with this:

And then welded them on to the tray:

Not too shabby looking. Not perfect, but pretty decent. A locking nut will complete the kit when I can find some of those things, or Mike can find them, too. I'm not picky. heh

Magic tip time! I wanted to try something with making a spacer to prevent the seat pan from getting pulled too far down with the wing nut. I cut a small piece of 1/2" aluminum rod and evened up the ends. I wanted to drill a hole down the middle of the short section, but attempting to hold that in my fingers would be finger-a-cide, so I came up with a simple but highly effective clamp that gave me enough leverage to prevent the rod section from spinning.

It took a long time to tap this darn thing. I had forgotten my number drill set (you likely have no idea what I am talking about . . . unless you are a machinist or very familiar with drilling and tapping holes), so I didn't have exactly the right twist drill (commonly known as a drill bit, which isn't exactly correct) size on hand to make tapping through that section easy. But I managed. I so wanted a lathe. I would have been done in less than 5 minutes, including all the tool changes. LOL! Oh well . . .

This is what it ended up looking like:

But my measuring was off:

 Remember that whole measure a lot of times and cut/drill/weld once thing? Yeah . . . But, after testing things out, I determined that it wasn't necessary to have the spacer there at all, since the pan is 18g steel, it barely flexes when you crank on the wing nut . . . Next time, I think 20g will be easier and faster to work with. LOL!

Nearly final battery tray installed:

And the final profile view of the seat pan and battery tray on the frame:

It looks really sleek! I can't wait to see how the rest of the bike comes together! Mike's got some good plans. =) 

Cardboard conundrum, or Poor Man's CAD

Today I spent some time getting down and dirty with cardboard. If you're on the internet, I am pretty sure you've heard about CAD, or Computer Aided Design. It's really rad and all, but, for many people who build stuff, it is still out of reach other price wise for software, or, in my case stupidity. (I've never learned to use any of it.) There is another alternative, however, that works better for many people, especially if you like to get hands on and try to make things work, or, if you have something that you only need to make one of and that one thing has to fit on something that wasn't made with particularly tight tolerances, like Mike's bike, for instance.

I will say today was semi-embarrassing. Well, it is only embarrassing if I tell you about it, which I am going to so that makes it embarrassing. What shouldn't have taken more than a couple of hours took me all day. Being out of practice sucks, and not being with the tools I am normally accustomed to have to aid me in my pursuits. Enough excuses, on to pictures!

I started with the battery tray, since that needed to be set at a depth that would allow for a maximum of 60mm or so for the battery and electronics:

This also led to the first of many revisions to my measurements. The gap you can see on the sides of the straight up and down piece were too great and with the next version, I tightened that up considerably. 

Lots of scribble, lines, and mistakes that all get confusing:

But, after cutting the right pieces out, I end up with this:

Very minor profile! The gap there is from the thickness of the cardboard hitting the brackets. I might have to make a slight trim on the actual metal, but it is nothing more than about 4 seconds with a cutoff disc won't cure. 

Here's the interior of the battery tray:

Plenty of space for whatever Mike wants to stuff in there. 

Here is a view from the other side: 

I didn't get a lot of in-progress pics for the next part because I was busy and email cell phone pics to Mike to clear up some concerns I had with how things should fit around the tank. 

One of the reasons why it took so long to do was that I discovered that with the tank in place, it was impossible to get the seat pan as close to the tank as Mike wanted while having the top of the seat be completely flat, as if you look from the side, there is a lip that comes off the back of the tank. So, I raised the front support for the seat (I didn't grab pics of that, oops) by a 1/4" and that gentle slop raised the front of the seat pan enough to clear the tank. Also, in the side view pic above, I had to slowly trim back the front of the side sections in order to clear the lip. Lots of back and forth and fit and test and cut and draw and cut. LOL!

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should explain a bit more about what is going on. Mike wants the seat low and lean, to keep the lines of the bike flowing with minimal visual interference. The custom hoop that I installed a few days ago is part of that design. Looking, well, staring at the bike when I first got it, I saw a natural break in the supports for a seat pan. What I envisioned was making the front section (as you see above) then making the rear section (as you'll see following this mess of text), joining them together at their vertical supports in the middle. This would make the seat stiffer and the metal easier to handle. (Separate pieces are easier to move around, cut, form, drill and weld on than larger, bulky and floppy pieces.) With that being said, it's time to move on to more pictures.

This is a support I made for the template:

The longer piece that is inline with the frame is not going to be in the final seat. I just make it to prevent the cross-brace from falling over. heh 

There was a huuuuuuge gap in pictures again, but here are the final ones:

My brain is so rusty. It took hours to figure out the rear section. What happened was I wasn't using the correct radius for the ID of the bent tube for the hoop. I was using the centerline radius (4") instead of the ID radius (3.75"). UGH! I wasted a lot of cardboard and time. BUT . . . I got it figured out!

I don't have a ring roller (yet) so rolling that ring for the rear of the seat is going to be tricky. I have something I want to try with my newly acquired bead roller (thanks again, Mike!) to mimic a bead roller. Since I am only dealing with 18g steel, I think it will work. Time, and this blog, will tell.

Side view of everything mostly in place, though not everything is seated as it will be:

And the final pic for the evening:

As much as this was a pain in the butt, I really enjoyed the work, even the frustrations of it. My brain was actually working (though creaky and in need of lots of WD40). It is so hard to describe the joy I get from doing this kind of thing, and that is why I want to keep doing it, constantly improving in everything I do. I love these kinds of jobs, as I get to learn-relearn, improvise, adapt, overcome and ultimately bring something into this world that was previously only a dream or a sketch or a thought or simply a desire. Mike said "I would go so far as to say I'm alarmed at how perfect that seat is to what I envisioned." That's the kind of work I try to do.

Now let's see if I can translate that mess of tape, cardboard and pen lines into a functional version in metal that will be enjoyed by Mike and probably his wife. I can't wait! =) 

Wear your effing safety glasses/goggles/shields.

After a late but very productive day yesterday, today started off bright and early with a good breakfast and running a few errands. After getting that stuff done, I header over to the "shop" and set to work.

I had noticed yesterday that the bandsaw wasn't exactly set very perpendicular to the work table, so I got out my square and got it as close as I could. Then I cut four 1.5" long pieces of tube:

They turned out really decently with the adjustment! Also, as a side note: ALWAYS DE-BUR YOUR WORK! Always. It saves your fingers and makes fitup a lot better overall. 

Those four pieces are going to be slip fit collars for a collector:

The reason for doing it this way is that the steel is good quality and thick enough (16g) so that "normal" tailpipe expanders cannot actually expand the metal enough to make slip fit joints. This is HIGHLY annoying to me. My good tailpipe expander is even too large to fit into the tubing of that particular collector, so I am forced to try goofy things like this. The hardest part will be welding the insides, though I am likely going to cheat and MIG those parts since even my small TIG torch can't really reach in too far and the pieces will need to seal. 

Once I finished those up, I moved on to the next task: removing the motor from my Che-ese drill. (Che-ese = Cheap + Chinese)

I've had this thing since 2003. It stopped working last summer. I figured that the cheap motor just died. No biggie. I'd take the motor to an electrical supply store and get a new one that is likely way more torquey than the old one. Well, that wasn't the case. I pulled the switch plate off and was looking at the wiring, figuring that maybe something had come loose, since, after all, this is a Che-ese drill, and something could have fallen apart. Poking around the innards, I found wiring that didn't make much sense. How hard can it be to wire in two three-wire wires? (Hot, neutral and ground, the modern wiring standard for AC electrical supply.) Well . . . after a few minutes of probing the switch and wires with my multimeter, I was convinced that the darn thing hadn't been wired correctly from the beginning. I switched two wires around and the motor spun up better than ever! Now the only question that remains is how the heck did it work for 7 years with the wiring screwed up? That is some Chinese magic, no doubt. 

I spent a good bit of time sharpening tungsten after that. Talk about mind-numbing activities . . . I mean, it is involving. You have to angle the tungsten correctly, rotate it at the right speed and hold on to it without letting it bounce too much on the stone. What's worse is that I was starting from scratch with 10 brand new 1/16" electrodes. You might think that thinner would be faster, but that isn't the case, because you can overheat them much more easily so you can't apply as much pressure as you would a thicker tungsten.

I haven't used any electrodes so thin before. I am kinda of excited to see what difference it will make when welding the thin tubing and sheet I am going to be concentrating on over the next week!

The afternoon progressed into early evening. I started up on another piece to a puzzle: the rear hoop for Mike's CB450 frame. He bought a pre-bent hoop that was mostly the right width but with legs that were too long. That isn't an issue with a bandsaw around, though. =) 

As I mentioned a moment ago, the hoop was mostly  the right width and I wanted to spread the legs a bit wider to neaten up the transition as much as possible so I can save myself some work and make things look cleaner all together. 

Here's the hoop in the vise:

I simply used the vise to act as an expander.

With the extra length of the legs, I got the hoop to open up a bit, but the material sprung back quite a bit. I shortened the legs up just past the first bends and started to slowly expand the hoop which worked brilliantly. 

I was taking it very slow, working the hoop a little at a time, since too much too fast is NOT a good thing when trying to maintain a nice, mandrel bend. 

Until . . . the hoop sprung off the vise so fast i couldn't even react and it hit me in the face. Specifically, it hit my right eye lens of my safety glasses and smacked my lip pretty good, too. The impact was so intense, the edge of my safety glass lens sliced open my cheek like a shear, thusly:

My face hurts. I cleaned up the cut and put the butterfly on it. I know I am going to get fussed over when "normal" people see it (especially a certain woman), but it'll be fine eventually. After I got it cleaned up I tried on a different set of safety glasses and my nose promptly protested enough to tell me to call it quits for the evening. 

The whole point of this is that I would be out an eye, or, look like I lost a fist fight if I had not been wearing my safety glasses. WEAR THEM. You are beyond foolish is you don't. Wear them before you start working. Keep them on at all times. Don't take them off until all your tools are at least at rest and nothing is under tension or stress. 

Final pic of the evening:

The angle of the camera lens throws the perspective off a bit, but the hoop nearly matches the outside of the frame rails. This will be much easier to fit up once I trim the legs to match the profile that Mike wants, which is basically as short as possible to enhance the lines of the bike.