Continuing the ‘rust’ motif, I had to figure out what bits should have that application, er, applied to. I knew I was going to do the seat/cowl, but what else? I also knew I was going to do something leather-like for the handgrips and seat, so that was all a place to start.
My original bar-end weights I had used on the “blue” version of the bike were cool, but their circumference was really too small for the old grips. That being said, the rubber compression shims (?) that they used were perfect for my needs, so I figured I’d just cannibalize them. The only problem was that all the new fancy-schmancy wiring installed inside the left-hand handlebar tube was tucked in absolutely as far as it was going to go, and the existing rubber shim was too long for that side. A little gentle coaxing with an exacto knife sussed that problem. I ended up cutting that bolt off by about an inch and tested for fitment. All good.
I wanted to do something a little out there for the actual bar ends, something that felt kinda ‘rough hewn’. I devised a plan involving 8 to 10 discs, all roughly the same size, that would stack together. First I cut some strips from my sheet ‘o steel, center-punched them where the holes needed to go and drilled them out.
Next step, I rummaged through my parts bins and found a little electrical connector that was the perfect combination of hole-size and length. It made for a great little impromptu compass while utilizing the newly drilled holes. I -could- have used a regular-old compass with the center-punched divots before drilling, but my experience is that about half the time my drill will creep a fraction of a millimeter when it bites into the steel, and I didn’t want to end up being off. I started with a fine-line sharpie to make sure it was going to work, then a thicker one so I’d be able to see the lines once I started in with the angle grinder.
Once that was sorted I hacked them all apart with the cutoff wheel, put a bolt through a stack and clamped them into the vice. All I needed to do was to get them as close as possible to ’round’, and give just a tiny bit of taper from what would end up being the inside end to the outside.
One they were shaped, I spent a couple minutes stacking them together and rotating each disc one way or the other ’til they looked good. You also get to see the test-wrap of the leather cord I’m using for the grips. I -almost- kept them bare metal as they are here, but as you’ll see later, I hit them with the rust treatment to help tie the look together.
As long as I’m hacking up bits of metal and such, I had two nagging issues to deal with. One was the lack of a front fender. Now, I actually really dig how a bike looks without one, especially when adorned with any kind of knobby or semi-knobby tires. BUT, since I was changing the angle of attack by raising the rear of the bike with the new shocks and rim, I figured anything that would help stiffen the front forks side-to-side couldn’t be a bad thing. I’d seen small micro-fenders that were used for just that, but again I went down the ‘wonder what I can make myself’ path. On a similar note, I absolutely didn’t want to use the massive stock belt guard that wrapped all the way round the top of the rear wheel pulley.
First up – the fender. Seeing that I actually HAVE the original fender, I figured what I needed was, as the sculptor would say, to remove the bits that don’t belong.
And the belt guard gets the same treatment:
The paint treatment was done with “Modern Masters Metal Effects” paint, a pretty groovy three-step process. First you coat with two passes of their primer, let dry for a couple hours, then two coats of whatever ‘metal’ you’re working with. I did a combo of “Iron” and “Bronze”, and sometimes hit it with a little “Copper”, all sponged on. Once that dries you mist-spray it with an activator, which slowly evaporates and over the course of an hour produces a pretty killer distressed metal look. The cool part about all this is that if the paint were to get scraped off or something during riding, it would eventually surface-rust anyways. This is just a little more controlled.
This is how it worked on the belt guard:
The front fender came out like this:
Since this all was working pretty well, I put on my big-boy pants and went for the the most visible version of this – the seat cowl. Since it’s fiberglass instead of metal, I expected there could be some variation in the look, but it’s actually pretty close. My original intent with all of this was that I’d hit all these parts with some matte or satin clear-coat to add some protection. I tested that theory first on the flat part of the seat pan that won’t be visible to see how it looked. Unfortunately, at least on the fiberglass, it made the rust treatment look like shitty cheap plastic. Oh well. Guess it’ll be fine without.
Apparently I’ve documented this a little out of order – the front fender is still blue here. Weird.
Next up – seat mounts, forward and backwards in time.