Time passed, I healed, and began to think about what I could do to get back on two wheels. I was a little gun-shy, but not too much. Possibly because I knew I didn’t have a functional bike, so the point was moot. Due to some screw-ups in the administration side of UC I accidentally got ‘terminated’ from teaching by a glitch in the system between the end of the 2019 spring semester and the beginning of a short five-week ‘maymester’. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it caused some problems. The bigger issue was that my new sort-of boss in the department only had so much power to bring me in full time. He was convinced he could get it to happen by fall, but that meant I had to come up with something in the meantime. I’d been in the throws of a job search for a few months now, and had to pull the trigger on unemployment. Weird to be a mid-50’s professional with a solid (if kind of bizarre) resume and not be able to pull in more than one or two interviews. It was getting scary.
One thing I took advantage of, though, was UC had just opened a brand-spanking new Makerspace that was free to use for all UC faculty and staff. Over the course of the next couple months I learned all of the metal-shop equipment, learned out to weld and plasma cut, and how to design objects in Fusion360. I was starting to formulate a plan for the old Savage and taking it as far as I possibly could.
A couple caveats – I had taken wood shop in high school and have always been -ok- with woodworking. Not great, but good enough. I had -never- played with metalworking. In my mind it was voodoo magic science that took more tools, know-how and talent than I figured I’d ever be able to learn. After my first orientation class at the Makerspace and getting to actually use a cold saw, metal-cutting bandsaw, mandrel bender, sandblaster and some other bits I started to think maybe this wasn’t unattainable.
The MIG welding class was eye-opening. I had no idea that it could be so relatively easy…and suddenly I had a whole workshop I could use to start the process.
So I started planning, and quite frankly from this point forward is -probably- what you’re here for in the first place, oh gentle reader.
I knew I wanted to go as “Cafe'” as possible, and also knew there was no chance I’d be able to spring for the close to $4k it would take to purchase a RYCA kit. That, and it appeared that RYCA might be out of business, or at least everything on their site was back ordered with no indication of when they might be back in stock.
I really dig the fuel tank from the BMW R-Nine-T, so I started looking up how one might make a custom fuel tank without an english wheel and all the other sheet metal shaping tools one would need. One, we didn’t have that stuff at the Makerspace, and Two, I have literally no idea how to do any of that. Even if I had an inkling, that is a skillset one doesn’t just acquire via a few YouTube videos. So I found info on fiberglass tanks and started thinking. Lots of conflicting info on whether or not fiberglass would hold up to modern ethanol-based fuels. Some articles said if you use a polyester-style resin all would be fine, others said epoxy, others said if you used carbon fiber instead of fiberglass… well, you get the drift. I figured worse-case I could give it a shot and if it didn’t work I was only out time and a little bit of cash.
First order of business – figure out what the hell the tank would look like in 3d. I’ve dabbled in 3d animation in the past and know a little bit about working in that environment, so Fusion 360 was pretty easy to wrap my head around…but that being said, I think it would be just as easy for anyone. It’s pretty intuitive.
This was pretty close. I knew I wanted a groovy knee-cubby in the side of the tank and at least this gave me the ability to ‘get my hands on it’ and rotate it around, see how it looked from every direction.
Next step was to buy some insulation foam. The way this is supposed to work is you glue up the foam into a big enough block, mount some identical left and right wooden guides, do your carving, lay your fiberglass, and then in the end you pour acetone into the cavity which will completely dissolve the foam and leave you with an empty tank. Easy peasy. In theory.
So. Foam was glued up and the wooden templates designed and cut out on the bandsaw. Next step was to attach the templates on either side of the foam and build a ‘hot-wire bow-saw’. There are a bunch of ways to go about this, I used an electronics project power supply, some PVC pipe and a guitar string. It sufficed, though I had a hell of a time dialing in the right amps/voltage to heat the guitar string without popping it like a bad light bulb. When it’s all working correctly you just let the wire follow along the curves of the templates and hey-presto! You have a profile cut. Busted strings and wonky voltage aside, in the end I got the profile good enough for the next step.
Next up, use a ruler and caliper to lay out the symmetry of the top profile. This took a hot minute and I have to admit my ability to pre-viz in my head exactly how this would all work when all the cuts were made is apparently not a strong suit for me. But I labored on.
The ‘bow saw’ wasn’t going to work for this next bit as there was no way to form any kind of template for the hot wire to ride along, so another solution is required. I found online plans/videos for making a DIY hotwire table using plywood, chunks of 2×4, a spring and an old guitar tuner, all of which I happened to have lying around.
It worked ok…but not as well as I’d hoped. The hot guitar string elongates from the heat, and the spring is -supposed- to keep it tight. In this case it wasn’t really enough and caused some frustration. I ended up getting it mostly shaped and then resorted to a big serrated bread knife to get the last bits of top profile knocked out.
Carving the knee-cubbies was done with a mini-curved sureform rasp and an orbital sander, and the right side worked out pretty nicely.
I then began trying to somehow match the opposite side. This was going to prove to be rather irritating. I mean, um, tricky.
More on all this later – I got it pretty close, but there were a couple problems I hadn’t discovered. Onwards and upwards…