!Huge Update Ahead!
Instead of doing a couple smaller posts showing the steps we took to get to where the bike is at today I decided to just dump it all in here in ONE HUGE UPDATE!!!!
Tons of pictures, atleast more than 1 this time, and lots of info.
Unfortunatley I didnt take as many pictures as I would have liked before starting this blog so what has already been done wont be as picture heavy as what will come from now on. But that just means you have lots to look forward to in the future
Lets get into it.
This picture was taken so I could use it at home to start sketching out the tank and rear fender design
In the end I didnt do much sketching at all, but the bike already looks sportier without the seat. Arent we gifted custom bike builders
One of the only shots of the breakdown in process. You can see the little gas rocketship type heater we were using. This was in December.
The bike had brand new rubber on both ends! How sweet is that. They both still had all their little hairs. Big plans for those 5 spoke rims as well, they will be getting dropped in the blasting cabinet as soon as the rubber comes off.
This is the very first night of breakdown. Of course I went right for the handlebars and lights. They are easy to take off and make you feel like you've done alot
Two things here:
1. You can see how filthy that top fork bridge is. Thats pretty much how everything will look.
2. I got into the habit of putting every bolt, screw, pin, back into its female counterpart as you can see from the handlebar clamp bolts still in their places. This is great for a number of reasons. You dont lose the small parts, and you dont have to remember what bolt goes where since its already there.
First night of breakdown doesnt look like much after you spread it out. Most of these parts will be sold on ebay since im not keeping it the least bit stock.
After this the table just became absoluetly covered in parts and tools.
If we jump ahead in time, since I wasnt taking alot of pictures back then, we see the bare frame with the 750cc engine in the background. Pulling out the engine was fairly easy, after we figured out which parts had to come off in order for that to happen which included the oil pan and another part of the case.
If you look at the frame just above where the Dewalt drill is you will see that the frame is seperated. I dont know enough about this bike to know if Honda did this for frame stress reasons or just to make it possible to get the engine in and out, but it definently helped.
Now we have a bare frame and enough parts to completely cover that original table. So Andy got ahold of some shelving units and we reorganized.
Its actually really nice having a shelf for electrical and a shelf for engine parts and so on. Who would have thought it would work better than a dusty pile on the table?
Here's the beauty all by herself. Propped up on a couple bricks to protect the insides exposed when we took the oil pan off. Her outside might be a tarnished mess but as you'll see soon enough she's as clean as a whistle inside. And thats where it counts
Well that does it for the breakdown. The part we were really excited to get into was creating the new rear fender and extending the gas tank.
My brother actually introduced me to cafe bikes in 2006. The concept stuck with me for a couple reasons. Ive always been a big fan of taking older cars, trucks, bikes and restoring them into something really unique. So the idea of taking Hondas that were over 20 years old and putting a new spin on them seemed like alot of fun. I also like the looks of a 70's-80's cruiser-turned-sport-bike over a 70's-80's sportsbike. It might just be the more exposed engine and longer front fork, but who knows.
So when I approached this project it wasnt with the plan to create a nice cafe bike, it was with the plan to take many different design ideas (obviously most heavily influenced by cafe bikes) and make something unique. Maybe it will be unique just because its weird or maybe it will be unique because its going to have some sweet lines and a sick attention to detail
We started with the seat and rear fender and decided to do the gas tank extension last. We scrapped the original rear fender and mud guard and came up with this awesome idea. To use the back half of the seat pan as the bottom of the rear fender. Crazy you might say, genius I say. We chopped up the original foam seat (the stock cover was rotted and dried out so it wasnt worth selling) into the new shape we wanted to use. That meant we cut about 5 inches right off the front (for the later tank extension) and pushed the back lip back 4 inches into what used to be the foam for the back seat. This created a very comfortable seat and allowed us to see where the seat should end and the rear fender begin. This may sound very confusing so let me show you a picture
I hope that helped.
Where you see the pink bondo'ed fender is where the passenger used to sit. That fender was crafted right to the seat pan. That means pulling the fender off is as easy as pulling the seat off. But better yet it means minimal junk hanging off the back end and maximum rear tire exposed for a serious case of bad-assness.
The fender fabrication, like the tank extension, is fiberglass with a coat of bondo to smooth it out. We dont have access to the necessary tools to make them out of sheet metal so we did it this way. In the future I might just buy some prefabricated units to save time, but it was alot of fun molding and creating these from nothing
So, after the rear fender and seat designs were finalized we were able to start the gas tank extension. After Andy and I had discussed various design ideas we got started and here is what it looked like after fiberglass.
But it doesnt take long to get from ugly fiberglass to less-ugly bondo.
This shot also makes it easier to see that frame seperation I was talking about earlier.
Heres another to show the contour lines on the tank that on future projects may be removed for the sake of sanity and time.
That back fender might look fat but with the seat on it just looks phat
So that is where we are at with the fabrication of the fender and tank. The seat is a work in progress as is the front fender. If I can get an 80's Magna front fender to fit I might go with that since it is considerably smaller and sportier. If not I will just chop up the original one into a shape I like and go from there.
The frame is in line to get sand blasted as soon as the weather gets better (since im doing it outside) so for now we are cleaning parts in preparation to put it all back together. I bought a sand blasting cabinet and let me tell you, it is sweet. Here's a couple shots to show you.
Here is one of the cylinder head cover after I blasted half of it. The whole engine is about as tarnished as that left side.
Im using 30/60 Grit (Extra Fine) Black Beauty as my media and it does a great job of taking off paint, dirt, grime, and surface rust without harming the metal. When blasting alluminum it is better to use a nozzle with a larger hole so that it doesnt concentrate the sand as much and dont hold the gun too close (closer than 3 inches) or keep it on an area too long after the paint is gone. Alluminum is soft of course and you can begin to crater the surface as you work past the somewhat harder more resistance outer surface. This of course I learned from experience
And here is the head cover after its all cleaned.
So fresh and so clean
While im showing you the head cover I thought I would show you the heads themselves. As I said earlier this engine is clean as a whistle (its 27 years old! ).
You could eat off that if you didnt mind the grease and you didnt spill any crumbs.
Here's one seat bracket cleaned sitting next to its filthy twin.
As long as you are careful you can clean right up to rubber parts (like those 2 rubber gaskets) and not ruin them.
Both seat brackets and some motor mounts and other small parts I cleaned in one sitting.
All these parts together took about an hour to clean. Sand blasting guns just dump compressed air so if you are running off an electric compressor like myself (even though it has a 33gallon tank) instead of a gas one you have to stop and wait for it to catch up alot or you can hurt it.
You want to talk about filthy parts, take a look at these carbs.
I blasted one of the vacuum covers to see how it looked. I still have no idea how we are going to clean all the external carb parts without taking it all apart, which I REALLY dont want to do. Soak it and scrub it most likely. That will come later.
Well, im afraid ive run out of pictures which means I must have shared with you everything I have a record of so far.
I'm taking a road trip starting this coming Thursday so it will be a short week, but we should be able to sand blast the rims and frame and get the tank and rear fender both primed and glazzed and ready for paint.
Thanks for taking the time the read about our little project and keep this in mind if you've ever thought about doing something like this yourself.
Neither one of us has ever done this before. We are both just carpenters who started with a 27 year old bike, 2 boxes of wrenches, a grinder/cut wheel, a drill, some fiberglass and bondo and the desire to take on a new challenge and create something unique.
We took the time to reorganize the whole garage with the new shelves. Ill leave you with a picture of it and our project bike, Andy's Magna 700, and the Magna 1100 he is parting out. It almost looks like a bike shop
And remember, neither one of us has any idea what we are doing.
there are only 2 kinds of bikes: It's a Ninja... look that one's a Harley... oh there's a Ninja... Harley...Ninja...
