Hey, I’m excited about the positive feedback about my shop girl posts, thanks!

This week I helped Rob as he experimented with building his first ever cafe seat.  After deciding the shape, we made a cardboard pattern and mocked it up on a frame to make sure the proportions were right.  Then we traced the pattern pieces onto a sheet of steel.

After cutting out the pieces, we smoothed out any rough edges on the wire wheel and hammered flat any bends.  Then the piece was rolled through the slip roller to give shape.

We decided a slightly concave end piece would give the seat some character, so we hammered the steel with a nylon mallet.  To get a really tight bend, we then hammed it over a steel hammer head.

The pieces fit pretty good.  Next Rob tacked the pieces in place with a few TIG welds.

The steel used was a little rusty, so before a full weld happens, the pieces will have to be cleaned up to ensure a strong weld.  It’d be cool to stamp some numbers on that back end plate eventually.  We’ll see what happens.

-janelle

I know a lot of guys were asking about making our own brake / clutch cables to save some money. I stumbled across this site that we can order everything needed to make our own lines.

Flanders Cables

Max

Hey guys, thought I’d share some info on the front end swap I did over the winter on my ’72 CB350. I decided to go this route for a number of reasons, but it started out as just wanting to beef up my fork tube diameter from spaghetti noodle thin 33mm to a sturdy 35mm. In doing research I also found that road racers look for triple trees with four bolt pinch mounts on the bottom yoke as apposed to the CB’s two, giving more clamping surface area and a more secure attachment. This left me with a few options but I decided to try out a Yamaha XS front end because of the added benefit of aluminum shouldered rims and a simple dual disk conversion. Took a lot of time researching and sourcing parts but here’s the quick version:

The assembled front end consisting of XS650 trees, wheels, and forks.  Brake calipers and dual lines are from a XS750 and the brake rotors are from a XS1100.  I used a super helpful Yamaha Part Finder website to figure out which parts are interchangeable between the different years and models.

Tapered bearing kit for CB350 from All Balls Racing works perfect with the XS stem, no modifications needed.  I also bought a bearing kit for a XS650 thinking I would need to combine pieces of both but since I didn’t need it if anyone is looking to upgrade their XS bearings I’ll part with them for cheap.

Lower bearing in place and new upper bearing race installed.  The kit replaces both stock ball bearing races.

Final product:

Brake master cylinder and stainless lines I picked up from MikesXS.com

All in all I’m happy to have a rock solid front end.  Being such a light bike dual disks are probably overkill… but it looks bad-ass and I’ll be able to stop using one finger.  Can’t wait to get it on the road and test it out.  I’m doing a shit-ton of other modifications to pretty much every aspect of this bike so I’ll share them as they get completed if you guys like.

bob.

Hey guys,

Just another update. I’ve been cranking away on the bike, trying to tie up all the motor work so I can finish the rest of the bike for my April 1st deadline. I got to the magneto swap and the whole process is just pretty cool, so I decided to shoot a couple videos of it. You can find tons of info out there on the web about it – I’m not doing anything new in these videos by any means.

The 650 is a great motor, very well designed, but with a couple flaws. One of the biggest (in my opinion) is the charging system. bad regulator, contact rotor, wiring nightmare, etc. they break and often for no reason. no idle charge. Broken or not it’s probably a good idea to perform this swap. It involves using a banshee mounting bracket and flywheel, a stator from a couple of more modern bikes (there is a list floating around out there) and a 3 phase regulator.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Hugh from Hugh’s hand built for make some wonderful aftermarket xs stuff. he provided the adapter plate and regulator for this swap. Keep it up my man. http://hughshandbuilt.blogspot.com/

Also, I’d like to thank Pete from Pamco (I think that’s his name – it’s his forum name at least) for the ignition system. No more CDI box waiting to fail me. my bike is running way better than before, and now it’s putting out 82,000 volts on spark. That allows me wider spark plug gap and a cleaner burn. check his stuff out at: http://www.yamahaxs650.com/

Anyway here’s the videos. Please bear with me, I’m not really a video making dude.

- XS banshee swap 1
- XS banshee swap 2
- XS banshee swap 3
- XS banshee swap 4

Cheers!

-Ludwig

Did the carbs on my 1987 cbr250r today. Way more headache than anything Honda from the 70′s.

1) Get all the plastic shit off

2) Get the carbs out. Man that shit looks different, Never seen carbs under the tank before.

3) New OEM air filter. That old one was seriously black as shit.

4) In-line fuel filter had a ton of rust in it. Fuck… So, I took the tank and washed it out with Muriatic Acid. That was a whole job in itself. Then I cleaned the petcock. Tank should be good now. New in-line fuel filter just in case.

5) Get those fuckers dialed in. Basically the exact same as my cb650 carbs… just a little different (and CV slide, not Mechanical slide).

6) All back together now. Took me about 12 hours total including cleaning the tank. Shit.

So,  when I got it all back together, at first, it was running a bit “boggy” on the main jet, or 3/4 to full throttle. I dunno what the issue is / was. I’m anal about doing carbs so I’m positive everything is together correctly. I thought maybe there was a little water left in the tank when I topped it off with fuel, so I bought some “gas treatment”, and increased the octane. After an hour of riding it, Its all good now, running solid and smooth. Revs to 18 grand furiously. Maybe it was a little water left in my tank, and thats all it was? Not 100% sure.

Anyway, what a pain in the ass doing carbs on a fuckin crotch-rocket. I miss my 70′s Hondas back in Philly. I’m flushing the coolant tomorrow. That “should” be a quick job. And don’t even get me started on changing the spark plugs… I had to drop the radiator to do them. Shit.

-Ed