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First of all: forgive me reader, it's been a long time since my last post.
You know how it goes: someone asks you to "assist a little in a project we're doing" and before you know it you are working flat out, day and night for a month and a half. Oh well, at least the pay was good. But if anyone so much as mentions the word "PowerPoint" to me before the new year, I'm going to go ape.
Big things have happened since my last post. I took my bike to the "SFRO"-man yesterday to get a preliminary OK for me to go ahead and finish the build. To make a long story short: in order for me to get my bike approved for the streets here in Sweden, I have to go through a series of steps. The first, and biggest, is the one I completed yesterday. Before I can paint my frame, I have to show my bike in a semi-finished state to a guy who is a certified inspector for "SFRO" – an organisation that performs inspections for the "department of traffic security". The rules governing what you can build and take to the street are actually quite liberal in Sweden, but they [SFRO] nonetheless want to make sure that people don't kill themselves on poorly constructed death traps. Fine with me.
So, I loaded up my bike and drove the 80 clicks to a place called Svedala, just outside of Malmö, where I met with the inspector. I had half expected him to give the bike a cursory glance and then give me the go ahead, but he took to his work with the fervor [and humour] of a preussian customs officer. He crawled around the bike, looking at every weld seam, every bolt and every nut. He even spotted the absence of a "certified for the street" marker on my tires, despite the fact that I had buffed out the "for racing use only" lettering. A process that took me several hours to get right. So now I need to borrow a couple of street legal 19 inchers for the next time I go back. After much sucking of teeth and scribbling on notepads he gave me the verdict: as long as I add another 15 mm to the trail, and get the tires sorted, he would give the bike his blessing. Result!
Adding some more trail is no biggie since the tripple trees are still in prototype form and by reducing the offset a bit on the finished items, I will get more trail. I can also lower the back a little which will give me the same result.
Then came the paperwork. In order to stop people from putting together a host of stolen bits and pieces and then registering their collages as "new bikes" and thereby entering them again into the system, you have to show proof of purchase of the major components and produce the papers that show that you are the rightful owner of the engine etc. Again: cool by me. I also got my new 17 digit frame number and the SFRO-guy, who by now had lightened up a bit, stamped the new number onto the side of the stearing head. He them proceeded to take photographs of the bike and the new ID-number. My bike was now officially a new product with a new identity.
While filling out the remaining paper work he went through the list of questions: "Capacity?". "577 cubic centimeters" I answered. "Tank capacity?". "Oh, about 8 litres". "Make?". "Eh...Husqvarna..." I started, before he interrupted me. "No, no" he said. "That was before you made something totally different of this bike. You can't register it as Husqvarna any longer, you are now the official manufacturer of this bike as far as the authorities goes. So who is the manufacturer of this bike?". "Erm... Krook Street...I guess?" And then it struck me: Krook Street, i.e. me, is now an official motorcycle manufacturer. Who would have thunk it!?
I have to admit that I chose my Braking wave rotors solely for their, erm... aesthetic value (i.e. I thought they looked cool). Imagine my surprise when I flipped through the pages of the latest issue of Performance Bikes, and found their test, aptly named, "Do wavy discs work?". It turns out they do. They (PB) swapped the standard discs on an R1 for the exact same disc type that I'm using, and the wavy beauts actually made the big Yamaha stop quicker. Significantly quicker in fact. They suffered less fade too. What was it they used to say at the Bauhaus school? Function follows form? or was it the other way around?
Does anyone know where all this crap goes? Jokes aside, I actually took the precaution of labeling most of the connectors, before I tore the bike down. Thankfully, the wiring loom is quite straightforward. It's no Gold Wing after all. No hand warmers, no GPS, no radio, not even a battery. My only concern right now is how to feed the Vapor computer with power, without running the risk of frying its little electronic brain... If it comes to that, I might have to read the instructions. Even if I consider that cheating.
I mentioned that I didn't like the look of the standard exhaust hanger clamp/band that was supplied with my Supertrapp exhaust. And that I wanted a somewhat tidier looking solution. This is how it turned out.
We welded a little stainless "stud" (is that the word?) with some M8-treads in it onto the back of the exhaust, bolted a new hanger to the stud and then welded a mount for the hanger on the underside of the tube supporting the seat unit. The hanger was laser cut out of 3 mm stainless, which is a little bit too Krauss-Maffei, but there was a little bit of a miscommunication over the material choice between me and the supplier... Since I had planned to powder coat it black anyway, and the hanger isn't very heavy, I chose to keep it. It's too bad you can't make a whole frame out of stainless (It's too brittle) – I just love the feeling of longevity you get with properly manufactured stainless pieces. Pardon the crap mobile phone-image.
My idea of keeping the bottom part of the original Husky frame, rather than fabricating that too, has so far proved to be a good one. Most of the fittings can be used "as is", and the engine mounts are already there, which of course saves time. However, since my new swingarm has a kink just after the bearings (number 1) it is now impossible to mount the rear brake master cylinder in its original place - since that space is now taken up by the new, wider swingarm. Instead, I have mounted it on the outside of the original bracket with the help of a couple of small spacers (number 2) that will be welded to the frame before I send it off to paint.
Despite the fact that is now sits a little bit further out, It's actually not in the way of my foot, but the relocated master cylinder necessitated a slight mod to the brake pedal in the form of a new, straight, tab at the back (number 3). The original was bent inwards. BTW: don't you just wish you could weld alu like that? Thanks Kent. The original brake line was waaay to long for the now much shorter swingarm and has been replaced by a new steel spun one. If I can muster the energy, I will try to replace some of the ugly hardware on the brake cylinder with some stainless pieces. Damn, there is not too many things left to do now. Next up: getting the chain line perfect.
I got my brake hanger back today after my friendly fabricator Indiana had shaved off some 6 mm, leaving the full 15 mm only where the brake caliper bolts to the hanger. These are my findings on the subject of laser/abrasive water jet-cutting of thicker alu pieces:
"Daws" mentioned that the program I'm using – Adobe Illustrator – is not very good at generating AutoCAD-files and that the resulting curves are not as easy for the cutter head to follow as curves resulting from a proper CAD-application. And he does have a point. Looking at the cut surface (see image 1) it's obvious that the cutting head/water jet hasn't described perfectly smooth radiuses (radii?). It looks a littble bit as if the cutter head has paused/started/wobbled around a bit. This may of course be a characteristic of the water cutting method, but I suspect that it has something to do with the file as well. He also cautioned me that the cut surfaces won't be 100 "parallel" but rather have bit of taper - also a characteristic of the cutting method. Again, he was correct. It wasn't super obvious though and I'm not sure I would have noticed if I wasn't looking for it.
So, is it a worthwhile method? Yes and no. It's a quick and relatively cheap way of turning out pretty complex shapes without having to resort to more complex CAD/numerically controlled milling. On the other hand, the resulting pieces are nowhere near as perfect as pieces done using a mill. I spent three hours cleaning up and smoothing/straightening the edges in order to make it look like I wanted (see image 2). The surface isn't perfect yet – I'll leave the final polishing to the anodizers.
Conclusion: I think I'll save this method for thinner pieces in the future. And I'll use the freeware application "Solid Edge 2D Drafting" that Daws recommended.
Damn that Pareto guy and his damned 80-20 rule. You know the one that states that "80 percent of a company's revenue comes from 20 percent of its products" or "80 percent of all speeding violations are committed by 20 percent of the drivers" etc, etc. In my case it's: "80 percent of the build time is taken up by 20 percent of the components". Make that "stupid small stuff that I hadn't expected to be such a hassle".
At the moment it's the speedo issue that's driving me crazy. The speedo drive turns the cable 2,8 revolutions for every revolution of the wheel (I've measured it). When I mention this fact to people who sell speedos, the line goes quiet. Then they start babbling that "Most Harley Davidsons..." or "I know that old Shovels use a 1:1 ratio..." or something else irrelevant (99,999 % of all aftermarket speedos are for Harleys, it appears). And when I add that I now have a 19 inch wheel (rather than the 17 inch wheel of the Ducati 996 that the speedo drive comes from) they tell me – in order to make me go away – that I will never be able to get the correct gearing ratio. And without the correct ratio the speedo won't show the correct speed. And that means I won't be able to get my M.O.T.
"Well, change the speedo drive then", I hear you say. But, alas, I can't. The front spindle is 25 mm and the only speedo drive large enough is the Ducati one I already have. I've thought about some sort of solution where I could machine the spindle down to something like 20 mm (so that I can use some kind of jap speedo drive), but then I need some sort of sleeve to thread over the the end of the spindle, in order for it to fit the forks, and I don't like that thought at all. And besides, I don't want to throw away my exquisitely machined, hollow, stainless spindle.
So. Enough is enough. I've decided to eat my words, and go with an electronic speedo. I've found one from trailtech. It's called Vapor Stealth, it's black and it's OK looking. The superbly helpful technician I spoke with (why are all US help line operators so genuinely helpful and friendly BTW?) informed me that the installation is quite easy and even the RPM tachometer graph works on my Husky (despite the fact that it didn't come with a tach to start with), using a simple lead that wraps around the spark plug lead. Looking at my front disc I now realise that the good people at Braking had foreseen my failure to sort the mechanical speedo and have machined a little eyelet for the sensor magnet into the disc carrier. Hm...
First of all: forgive me reader, it's been a long time since my last post.
