Ok, I’m going to step backwards for a sec. I neglected to talk about probably the most significant ‘ok man, I guess I’m actually DOING this’ moments of the whole project. There are several of these moments to come, some much more non-reversible, but this was the first.
If I was going to do a cafe’ build, I was going to have to get rid of dead weight, and the stock airbox/battery compartment was a no-brainer. So I took a deep breath, rolled up my sleeves and yanked the whole shebang. I only -sort of- had an idea about how I was going to relocate everything, but was relatively confident that inspiration would fill in the blanks.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled nonsense.
I redid the whole oil plug -again- and replaced it with a dual-o-ringed metal plug custom made by Verslagn on the Suzuki Savage forums. I’m hoping that’ll do the trick and the oil leak will finally be a thing of the past. Won’t really know if it worked until this whole shindig comes to a conclusion. As long as the bike was up on the blocks, I read that it’s a good idea to check the cam tensioner, as they fail or at least get all wonky on older bikes with tons of miles on them. At 19 years, this qualified for age, but really hadn’t been ridden hard. I pulled to cover off and took a look.
Much to my joy, it was just fine. I buttoned it back up and continued the process. One of the things I really wanted to do was design my own rearsets for the bike. I had been getting pretty solid in Fusion 360 and began building out all the components virtually. The Makerspace also sported two 4-axis CNC machines, and I talked to the guy who ran them and showed him my designs. He was super psyched about the idea and as these machines were so new they were still being calibrated, he thought they would be excellent test cases and was going to run them for free once I made some adjustments.
It all went through a handful of iterations, but the basic design stayed pretty much the same. The mounting brackets would attach to a pair of master bolts that were part of the swing arm assembly on either side and tuck up behind the rear of the engine. I didn’t invent this idea – the RYCA system was pretty much where I pulled the idea from – but brewing my own was the only way it was going to happen as I mentioned before, at this particular moment in time most of these parts were out of stock on their site. Besides, doing as much of this as I could on my own was starting to really excite me.
Now that I knew these were going to be possible, I put them on the back burner for a while, as I had a ton of other work to do before I started messing with the rearsets, ’cause once I pulled the forward controls, it was going to be another of those ‘no going back’ moments. Time to get the new seat hoop sorted.