Now that one of the more brain-taxing bits was behind me, I thought I’d tackle some cosmetics. One of the first orders of business was to figure out what to do about the great stinkin’ hole in the center of the fuel tank that housed the stock speedo. I hated it for a number of reasons, but the two that tipped the scale were 1) it’s ugly as sin. The cheap plastic housing just completely killed the vibe on the best day, and now that I was going for a much more ‘sorta-vintage’ vibe, that plastic had to go. 2) Having the speedo on the tank meant that in order to check speed (or make sure my indicator lights were showing whatever I thought the were supposed to be showing) I’d have to tilt my head down to see it. My helmet is a modern thing with a flip-down front. The chin guard blocks downward vision, and though I know a bunch of hard-ass grizzled-veteran bikers will scoff at the idea of checking speed, the local cops in my town are tenacious when it comes to speeding. And I -really- hate taking my eyes that far off the road.
So, time for a change. I got some cardboard out and messed around with a handful of shape ideas, some kinda bonkers, but all roughly like this:
The little hole would be for the ignition switch, the larger one -possibly- for the stock speedo, though I was railing against that idea. Once the shape was more-or-less sorted I started out with the idea I’d go with a hand-carved wooden panel and drop the ignition switch in the center of it with some holes for indicator LEDs. I selected some nice Walnut and Flame Maple chunks of wood I had kicking around from a couple guitar projects, along with a thin center-strip of Purpleheart, and glued up the initial bits.
I -love- the way the wood looks and am super-psyched to start carving. I used a second, thicker piece of Walnut as the base layer to handle the recess it would need to fit down nice and tight over the tank hole. I cut out that recess on my scroll saw and glued it to the top. I then used a cardboard half-template for the shape of the thing. Taped it to the centerline, traced it, then flipped it to the other side to make sure all was symmetrical.
I When ready I got my big ol’ dragon rasp (stewmac to the rescue again!) and started making sawdust by shaping the underside that would in theory mount flush to the tank.
I took it to the bandsaw to cut the thing close to shape, then spent a bunch more time rasping, filing, sanding… And got to here:
All excited by the progress I decided to drop it on the tank and admire the brilliance of my design before beginning to drill holes.
Yeah. U. G. L. Y. Holy cats, it looked TERRIBLE!!! Too clunky, too big, didn’t fit the aesthetic, didn’t belong in this plane of our cause-and-effect reality. I even think I heard wailing of demons from a parallel universe. Ugh.
Now what?
Clearly something else had to be done, and I refused to admit defeat and go back to the stock (barf) plastic mount just yet. One of the reasons I didn’t try to make anything out of metal is the curvature of the tank was going to be damn near impossible for me to match with any of the tools I have at home, but after a little screwing around I realized that if I could keep the shape -real- close to the size of the opening, it would essentially ride on top of that ridge, and with some rubber edging to cushion it, any little gaps would be negligible. So I started again.
Grabbing the same hunk of 3/16″ steel I’ve been cutting bits out of since the beginning, I devised a new and much smaller dashboard. One of the things that was bugging me was how weird it looked with everything centered, then I had the epiphany of ‘screw symmetry’ and play with a little honest-to-gosh design. The off-centered bits on the template worked -perfectly- with the necessary location of the three mounting holes (more on those in a sec). I used the same combination of cutoff wheel followed by flap disc in my angle grinder to get the thing shaped.
One of the challenges I kept scratching my head over was how I would mount the new dash. The old one had three spring-loaded bolts that screwed into the molded plastic, keeping the top clean. Since I was definitely leaning in this vaguely steampunk-ish direction, it occurred to me that I could simply buy longer bolts, reuse the springs and put cap-bolts on top. Maybe in a nice distressed bronze or something. But I’m getting ahead of myself – I still had to put holes in the thing. My method of measuring for the bolt holes was a little haphazard – using the mounting points on the tank to run a long scribe up to the metal dash, scratch a point, then compare it to a template of the mounting points cut from cardboard. I’m convinced there was an easier way to guarantee perfection, but in the end I realized the mounting points themselves had a fair amount of play, so as long as I wasn’t wildly off I wouldn’t have to start over. Knock on wood.
I knocked out the three mounting holes in short order, then used a step drill bit to do the hole for the ignition switch.
OK. I can -definitely- live with that!
The other issue was what to do with that big empty space. As mentioned above, I was debating putting the old speedo back in, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. While I was musing, my dear friend Christina Lambert (@RideActModel on IG), fellow filmmaker, actor, Jeep enthusiast, sport-biker that’s had her CBR over 120 on the track which probably makes me unworthy to be in her company stopped by. Among all those things, she’s also a highly skilled upholsterer and is doing the seat for this beast. While we were talking I was mucking about with the dash, and she said “You know what you should do? Put a compass there!”
SOLD.
I spent some time trying to find something that had the right vibe, the right size, and wasn’t an actual antique worth hundreds. I stumbled across this one, and it was perfect.
Now that I had the compass, I needed to bore a hole in the metal dash. I picked up an adjustable carbide-tipped hole cutter, did some test cuts in pine to check the size, and set to work.
Carbide-tipped my ass. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t cut evenly – in fact it barely cut at all. You can see in the second pic above that not only did it not even scribe an even-depth circle, it also completely blunted the tips within seconds. Un-friggin’-believable. So I had to come up with a solution that could do the trick. More research and I found out that my local Lowes (or was it Home Depot? Hmm..) had these monster hole cutter bits in-stock.
I won’t get into how I had to make the trip twice ’cause the online inventory said my closest store had one of this size in stock, and some numbnull had apparently put a DIFFERENT size in that one slot in the display. I was moving too fast and didn’t notice what I thought was a 2 5/8″ bit was actually a 2 1/2″. Grrr. Back to store, exchange, go to other store, procure, come home, cut.
Hmm. Well, I guess I -did- go into that. Ah well.
I don’t have video of the actual cut being made, but MAN, that was an adventure. It worked, all right…but was vibrating pieces off my drill press and was loud as hell.
A little grinding/sanding tidied up the hole, and I started playing with the ‘look’. One thing that was causing no small amount of angst was that I was pretty sure I’d -never- be able to match the paint I had done on the tank when I eventually would try to paint the new seat pan/cowl. I had stumbled across some paint that gave a faux ‘rust’ look which I’ll get into more later. I decided that my bike was going to be all green/rust/leather/chrome, so the dash should follow suit. After doing some tests on a scrap piece I applied the stuff to the dash, then used a big thick O-ring around the compass to isolate it and fill in any small gaps and a liberal slathering of JB-Weld to mount it in place.
After that disconcerting moment of seeing just how awful the wooden version looked (which honestly had me really questioning my whole ‘fit and finish’ plan), I was relieved and digging the results. So, as long as I was in a ‘muck about with rust-paint’ mood, I figured I’d tackle the rest of the ‘look’.