post number 76

Well I have been having fun with forks all day. I took the day off of work to get some things done on my sears project. I honed out the fork stem hole so that I had a .005 press fit between the stem and tripple tree casting.


Here is a pic of them being pressed together. I knurled the stem so that the lower bearing race would press onto the bottom of the stem. og stems had a .005 larger sleeve, but I couldn't get the right material for the blanks, so I had to compromise.

Here it is all pressed in! There is a .060 groove all the way around the stem for good weld penetration.

And all welded up. This will never go anywhere!

post number 75

Check out this neat setup for machining out the muffler castings that I just got. This seems to work well, I can get them dialed in within fifty thousandths which is pretty good for a rough sand casting lol.


These two castings were the samples from the run that I made. The foundry was a little excessive when they ground the flash off of the end. I had to cut this one up a little to turn it into a use able piece. Luckily they hadn't ground any of the other ones. I like doing that work myself, then if it gets messed up I can only be mad at myself.

post number 74

My daddy drilled out the .625 holes in my fork diving boards, they turned out well, now I just have to cut them off and weld them on straight.


I got my muffler castings in the mail for approval today. They castings turned out really well, I told them to not grind anything off of them because they were a little excessive on the prototypes.



Here is the small end. What a cool deal. I am going to run an aluminum one on my cannonball bike, it is half the weight.




Check it!

post number 73

My daddy is helping me out today and machining up the triple tree castings. Before we could machine them we had to straighten out the diving boards. I had problems with these breaking off in the wax stage of casting, so I asked the foundry to set them up in the right spot before they cast them. Everyone of them was crooked and most of them have to be cut off and re welded back onto the casting which is a lot of work, but it kind of fitsthe theme of this whole project lol


While my dad was working on castings I was working on my fixture for brazing the fork together. Here is the top clamp for the fixture. I spent most of the morning on the phone getting measurements from all over the country.



We machined the bottom tabs down to .315 just like the originals! The bar between the two pieces is the bottom part of my fixture. Lots of work and ciphering

post number 72

So I decided to go back out to the shop and make my bottom fork stud plates. The og ones are .312 thick, I didn't have any 5/16 plate but I did have some 3/8 ground steel plate from a tooling project from last year. So I am running a little beefier bottom stays. This will be advantageous for the cannonball run!


Here they are roughed out and with the holes drilled.



Here they are finished. This is a lot of work, and iwill probably have them lasered out from now on.




That was not enough so I decided to try and make my first bung for the front strut. I did a good job of cutting the radius and then cutting the groove in the center, but the only problem was that since I am using a thicker plate I ended up cutting quite a bit off of the length when I cut the wider groove. This mistake cost me an hour of my life that i will never get back lol, but I learned a good lesson, and the next parts will be better because of it!

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 70

This is probably the last time my flywheels will ever be completely apart


Here is a pic of me pressing the crank pin into the left flywheel.



Pressed in and ready for service! I actually have to do some machine work on the other side. It is some pretty wild stuff. Photos will follow.




Here it is all together. am so excited!