One of the things I had been avoiding was the intended relocation of the side stand. On the Ryca bikes, and most other cafe builds, the side stand pivot is moved to the rear of the engine so it won’t interfere with the shifter end of the new rearsets. Ryca had a pre-fabbed setup that involved new pivot, a metal bar that would span the undercarriage and a couple other bits all working in unison. The cost was somewhere around $350-$400. That seemed way steep to me for what it was.
I looked into some other options. Some folks used a cheap weld-on internally-springed stand, but the length ended up being too short for my application. Another guy (@Ohiomoto on the Savage forums) used his stock sidestand and mount, but chopped huge bits out of it to do the relocation.
I figured I’d have to come up with -something- along those lines, but kept hoping that my head would magically percolate a solution. Every time I tried to figure out how I could mount it farther back, I didn’t like how close it would be to the belt. I know it’s not like the thing would move once it was set in place, but it just seemed weird.
I started really looking at how I could re-use the stock mount… I mean, it would keep the side-stand safety switch in the loom, and it clearly was sturdy enough, so I started thinking harder about Ohiomoto’s solution and trying to devine from the photos exactly where I would need to cut. The more I looked at my stock mount, the more I realized that it was essentially flat on the bike-side except for the welded-on shifter lever pivot.
The shifter was redundant anyways, so once again I figured I had nothing to lose. I chopped that off and smoothed the scar with the angle grinder. I had also been trying to figure out how to make a really goofy bracket to bolt onto a couple bolt holes that were also part of the old mount – but it was going to be kind of wonky and something in my head kept nagging at me that I was thinking too hard about it. That’s when it hit me. The main problem with leaving the side stand where it was is that the tip of the stand would literally be making contact with the rearset shifter lever.
So. What if I could just move the whole thing forward and down just a couple inches using the exact same mounting points as stock?
As with a handful of things on this project I started off with a wooden template. I traced the contour of the stock mounting bracket and cut it out on the bandsaw. A quick test-fitting showed that I was on the right track.
I was psyched. The stand was going to tuck up -really- nicely between the shifter lever and the footpeg. So I was committed. I used the wooden mockup as a template and traced the shape onto some 1/4″ steel, triple-checking the bolt-hole placement, cut it out, did a test-fitting and when all seemed good I carved out the motor-side contour for access. To make this work I had to chop off the frame tubes that extended out for the original mount so I could tuck my mount as close to the frame as possible. You can see them at the front of the first Ohiomoto photo at the top of the page, right in front of his foot peg.
With this all in hand, I bolted the whole shebang up and tested for clearance:
It was working! I was overly pleased with myself – the alignment was gonna work, it tucked up nice between the shift lever and footpeg, a little high, but the bottom of my foot would still clear the tip of the sidestand…
And then I sat on the thing to check it out and if you’ve been paying any attention to the photos you know exactly what piece of the puzzle I had forgotten.
Yeah. I could shift down no problem, but dropping my toe under the lever to shift up got me all in the nerf with the stand. There was simply no where near enough clearance to get a booted toe underneath the shifter without hitting the stand.
Fuck.
Not one to be defeated by physics, I started trying to figure out how to solve it. What it was boiling down to is that it got better if the stand tucked up -closer- to the bike frame under the rearset… but then it was going to rub against the drive pulley housing. I started messing about with placing a small bit of 1/2″ steel rod to interfere with the tab on the sidestand that would activate the safety switch, and discovered I could -just- about make it work if I placed it just right, but it was still causing problems with foot clearance.
I wish I could draw out in a lovely engineer-friendly set of equations and drawings how I came up with the solution…but honestly it was mostly by accident. When the mounting bolts for my bracket were lose, the top end of the bracket would swing away from the bike with the weight of the stand/mount combo, and I discovered when it was like that things lined up perfectly. So I just had to come up with a way to make that ‘dangle angle’ permanent. It was simple enough, I used some spare bits of the stand-off tubing I had cut off the bike earlier to push the top of the mount out a bit.
The only thing that got a little wonky with all this is that by kicking out the front end of the mounting bracket to fix the clearance to the rear, now when the stand was lowered it was perilously close to having it’s front to back angle too close to 90 degrees. A little forward push on the bike made it want to fold up. So I took it off and got out my dremel and slowly started to grind away at the front-inside steel of the stand pivot bracket. It took a minute, but I was able to increase the angle forward enough that it doesn’t feel like a problem anymore.
Once I get to really start to use the thing in the real world I -might- decide to carve away a little more material, but for now I’m really quite happy with the results.
Hell, I might even try to sell these things. 😉