post number 95

I spent the day working on shop bikes which is bittersweet. It is difficult to not work on my sears with the weight of this luminous deadline hanging over my shoulders, but at the same time it is great to be able to make some money and work on knuckleheads! After hours I spent an hour ordering material for my center stand various bolts and trying to find this damn bearing. It has proved to be very difficult. I have three different companies looking for me, bu I may end up having to make the thing from scratch. I have a game plan/vision of how to do it in my head, but hopefully I will be able to avoid the process and the money it would cost in tooling...


This is a piece of hail that fell out of the sky today. it is an inch in diameter! These made a big noise when they hit our metal building shop!



Here is my first clutch gate. My friend Sonal came out and prepped all of the pieces and cut the rivets to the correct length. I peened these over. I still have to sand them down so that the edge is nice and smooth. It is a nice piece. Thanks sonal!

post number 79

Here is the set up for cutting the taper in the bottom frame rail. There is a .110 taper over 8.625 inches. I don't know why anyone would even bother to design such a small taper into a manufactured part. I have no choice but to replicate it, since I want the frames to be perfect. This is a finished piece after cutting and filing. It turned out really well. The wall thickness at the small end is still .125 , so it is far superior to an og frame.


The first step was to cut the one end down to .745, then I set it up in the lathe between centers and cut away.

post number 71

Here is a pic of me cutting threads on my sears fork stem.


Here is a pic of the top all finished up. Check out the little .125 groove that I cut in the stem. Delmar made the crown nut and lock nut.



Here is the finished piece. I had to knurl the base of it so that the bottom race would press on. Lots of cool stuff is happening so stay tuned!!!!!!!!!!!

post number 58

Here is another pic of the seat I mentioned earlier. It is a real puzzle, this is pretty clost to how it goes together. The springs are upside down in this pic./


I finished my seat post last night. I chose to cut the slot a little different than stock. I have seen these posts break at the bottom corner, a radius is a lot stronger than two sharp points, so I think that this will work better on my cannonball bike.



Here are the gas tank pieces that I got in the mail today. I should have made these pieces before the bottom parts, but it doesn't really matter now because I have them all.




I also started to machine this big hunk of steel. I love how it doesn't really matter how nasty a piece of metal looks on the outside, and it looks brand new after a little bit of turning. This is as far as I got last night before calling it quits and going home. Can anybody guess what it is? Please comment and let me know.

post number 57

Here is an o.g. seat post that my friend Bill sent me to copy.


I had to file a bur off of the large diameter to get the large nut piece to slip off. This is also the seam where the .5 threaded part presses into the upper piece. I can not tell if Sears sweat brazed the two pieces together because of nickle plating,

I decided to make the seat post for my cannonball bike one piece, which meant a lot of turning lol.

Here is the piece almost done, I still have to cut a groove in it and drill a hole for the top bolt, but you get the idea. The other ones that I plan on making will be two pieces just like the originals.

post number 34

Here is a pic of spinning my front cylinder to polish the base. I hit it with three different grits of sandpaper and polished it with some compound to get it nice and shiny.



Here is one of them!



And a pair!




The other side. This took a long time, but it was worth it.