Interruptions.

So, not a café racer then?

I think it's probably fair to say that I have far too many things on my plate and in trying to make some progress on all of them, I end up not making much progress on them. Occasionally, some new thing will inveigle it's way onto the schedule and if that doesn't go swimmingly well, it tends to throw a javelin through the spokes of the wheels of the wagon of progress on other things. The latest exemplar of this phenomena has been a rigid frame for a Triumph unit 750 engine which, predictably, rather more plummeted to the deep end of the pool and sat on the bottom sulking than it progressed swimmingly.

It's got a bronze swimming certificate.

In fairness, the lack of progress had more to do with the words "put those jig spacers in that stainless steel box" apparently meaning something other than "put those jig spacers in that stainless box" in certain local English dialects, and the eventual death of the nut in the tailstock feed on the lathe in the face of decades of neglect and abuse. Luckily, the nut in the tailstock died after I'd made some new dummy bearings to fit the headstock to the post on the jig, which meant that progress was held up as opposed to prevented entirely.



Making a mounting out of a molehill



Eventually, we, or at least Johnny, managed to track down a "little man" who could manufacture a new nut and that was sorted out for a reasonable sum of money.  With the lathe restored to full function we made the rest of the bracketry to retain the engine in the frame, and the Triumph frame is very nearly finished, although there is some muttering about fitting a twin leading shoe drum braked Triumph front wheel into the Suzuki GS550 forks. Luckily, I have a lathe for that sort of thing.



True Blue.

In between episodes of cursing the vagaries of assorted influences, I did manage to find the time to make the Z250 frame shiny and blue, so while progress was limited, there was at least some progress. I don't recall if I mentioned that I dismantled the shock absorbers and sanded all the paint off of the bodies in preparation for a fresh coat of paint. With the frame and swinging arm painted the next logical step would be to re unite them, and for that, I'll need the shock absorbers. Getting them painted and reassembled would seem like an idea in that case....

Who knows, it might even lead to some progress on the bloody thing.