The last few pages have been a bit lengthy, so this one will be a little shorter. I had some more cosmetic bits I needed to take care of – finish the handgrips/brake and clutch levers and perform some surgery on the head covers. To continue with this sorta-steampunk vibe I knew I wanted to try and add some purely decorative features.
For the grips, I was originally going to go with a sorta motocross vibe ’cause I found these black grips online and liked them. I pulled the control levers and sent them off to be powdercoated the same satin black I’d used for the rearset mounts.
As mentioned a couple pages ago I had decided against the black grips in order to play with leather. The process was pretty simple. First I wrapped both the left bar end and throttle tube with self-fusing silicone sealing tape. On the left bar end I then wrapped a layer of cloth tape to give it a little padding. I decided not to do that on the throttle side ’cause it was already a larger tube and I didn’t want it to feel much bigger. I kinda got used to smaller grip circumferences on the ill-fated Yamaha.
The idea of the silicone and the cloth tape was it gives me a base to attach the leather cord to without making it permanent. I’m hoping the treated leather cord will survive wear and tear and the elements, but just in case it doesn’t I’ll be able to cut it off and replace the tape-base easily. I started at the inside edge and began wrapping, using a small dot of CA glue along the front of the bar, doing about a 1/2″ at a time and wrapping as tight as I could. Worked pretty well. Here are the results, including the ‘rust-treated’ bar ends:
With that out of the way I started on the head cover modding. I purchased some brass mesh from a company in the UK, ’cause for some reason I couldn’t find anyone local-ish that supplied a tight enough weave. Basically this is filtering mesh. First thing to do was to sort out where I wanted the ports to be in the head covers, decide on the size of each, and throw caution to the wind with the help of the step bit and the drill press. I knew I wanted the center hole to be a little larger, and another little bit of a head-scratcher was that the head covers aren’t exactly the same. The left-side cover isn’t as long front-to-back, and I was a -little- worried that might cause some aesthetic weirdness in that I could either chose the engine to define the center line, or the head cover on that side. I went with the cover and that was the right choice.
I used JB-Weld to attach the mesh, but that involved some pretty harsh grinding away at some semi-structural bits on the inside of one of the covers. There are a couple of support struts that rubber vibration cushions mount on the right side, those were no problem, but the left cover has a more elaborate, rather odd design to do the same exact thing, and instead of two little round cushions the left side has this longer rubber strip that resembles a gasket (it’s not, though). With some judicious grinding I was able to flatten out the inner surface while keeping -most- of the mounting points for that rubber strip.
I liked this so much that I wanted to continue the motif. The drive pulley cover already has a couple ports in it, so it was kind of a no-brainer to do such a simple addition.
I suspect there’s a pretty good chance that mesh will get all gross over time as road grime, grease and oil get all over the inside, but for now it’s pretty cool looking, and here’s how it looks with the belt guard installed (note, this photo was taken -after- I did a bunch of other stuff, but I wanted you to see the full effect:
With those fiddly bits done, I still had a few rather major bits to work out. 1) Relocating the side stand. 2) Figuring out how to get the rear brake control cable/rod/whatever to function. 3) Mounting the tail pipe.
Big deals – but with some luck and a good tail wind I was beginning to see tunnel light.