Garage Night

I reluctantly conceeded defeat in the garage night challenge.  While the wheel did still need new wheel bearings, it was ready to be fitted with a tyre, so I paid up with a nice slab of James Squire Pale Ale.  On to tonight’s tasks, and it was a mixed bag of jobs.

A friend Steve came over, and we wasted no time putting him to work. He welded the exhaust for tsunamic back together, and fitted it to the bike.

While he was doing that, I finished trimming the seat base with the dremmel.  It was much more precise than using the angle grinder, and came up quite neat.  It’ll still needs a final sand, but the seat is pretty much done.  Here it is sitting on the bike.

Then we tackled the daunting tasking of working out how to fit the seat, and making up a rear ‘hoop’ for the subframe. Our pipe bender can only bend 7/8″ round tube, but can handle 1″ sqaure. The tube we need for the subframe is 1″ round. We first tried just using the square die in the bender, but that just flattened the tube out. We then decided to just bend it by hand around the square die. This produced a good result. We then started cutting out a notch for the tail light. We ran out of time to finish this .. so stay tuned for more progress.

Next the new wheel bearings were fitted to the wheel.  Then the fun job of fitting the brand new tyre and tube to the wheel.  We don’t have a fancy tyre fitting machine, just a pair of tyre levers.  After much cursing and swearing, the tube got pinched and we have given up on fitting the tyre.  We’ll take it to a mechanic next week to get it done.