I closed the last post with the line "If it doesn't work well, it doesn't matter who made it, it's still crap.", and coincidentally, this weeks mission was to reattach the side stand. If you've never owned a BMW Boxer (or at least a /7 age one) you may wonder why you normally see them parked on the centre stand. This is because while the BMW side stand is clearly to one side of the motorcycle, and therefore justifies that part of it's name, it's a little less clear as to how it came by the "stand" part of it's name. If you'll accept my definition of "crap", then "side crap" would be a better title for the thing.

The problem is that the side stand has been designed to meet some spurious regulation that assumes that the worst thing that can happen to you is pulling away with the side stand of your motorcycle extended. In their enthusiasm for making the stand idiot proof, BMW seem to have sacrificed it's ability to be gravity proof.

Since I'd already disposed of the centre stand mounts, then I was left with a choice between always parking near a wall, or improving on the side stand somewhat. I took a section of 1 1/2" OD, 1/8"wall tube and cut in half length ways to make a "saddle" to sit over the BMW's lower frame rail. Then I cut the original bracket at an angle so the stand would be further over centre when it reached the end of it's travel. My idea was that by increasing the amount the stand moved over centre, and by arranging for the motorcycle to lean over further, then things would be a lot less precarious while the thing was parked up.

The point of the "saddle" is three fold. Firstly, it's around 50% thicker than the factory frame rails, so welding it to the cast steel bracket is a lot easier, and welding the saddle to the frame doesn't present a problem either. Secondly, welding the saddle to the tube distributes the forces into the frame in a much happier fashion than welding the bracket directly to the frame rail. Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, two tacks on the inner most edge of the saddle will locate it firmly enough to support the weight of the motorcycle, allowing you to test out the positioning. Should it prove unsatisfactory, extending the stand and pushing down on it, will easily break the two tacks off.

Somewhere down the line, the original side stand bolt had gone missing and been replaced with a hex headed set screw that had had it's head ground to a countersink and a slot hacksawed in the end of it. That meant that the stand was pivoting on the thread of the screw, which isn't ideal, so I took an 8mm countersunk Allen bolt, and threaded it further up it's shank and cut the threaded portion off to the correct length. With that sorted out, I re-assembled the stand onto the modified bracket and got Ben to hold the bike at the angle I wanted it while I tacked the saddle to the frame. After a couple of goes at finding a position for it, I eventually had the stand positioned so that the motorcycle didn't appear to be in any danger of falling over, and the stand itself stowed away neatly missing the exhaust and gear change.

Many people would feel that was an inordinate amount of trouble to go to over a simple side stand, but I don't agree. Many of those same people would happily go to immense amounts of trouble, and expense, over a paint job. If the motorcycle is prone to committing Hari Kari every time it's left on the stand, how long is that paint job going to remain unmarked? Coming back to the motorcycle and finding that it has not only decided to lie down and have a rest, but also leaked the majority of the fuel that was in the tank all over the tarmac doesn't do much to improve your day either. I may have mentioned that it's not enough for a thing to work, it has to work well.

Something the motorcycle is clearly lacking, is a seat, and since the object of the exercise is to build something that makes the average passer-by think "Oh! Look! A Café Racer!" it needs a bum stop seat. I could just buy one, but there are a couple of snags with that, to whit, my knees and the point.

My knees would prefer it if the seating position was nearer to the standard height, and not the sort of height that an after market bum stop mounted on the seat rails would dictate. The point is that, at heart, this is a styling exercise and slapping some random piece of fiber glass on there doesn't contribute to a cohesive look. Now that it has a stand I can wheel the motorcycle out into the fresh air and stand back far enough from it to make some sort of a decision about what I want the seat to look like.

Because I need the seat height, I might as well stow a gel battery on its side under the seat, in which case, some of the other electrics might as well live there too. Hopefully I can stow the coils under the tank, I'm planning on dumping the standard electro-mechanical regulator and the diode board for the much more compact (and cheap) components from the inside a car alternator and there will probably be some trickery with relays involved. Unless I have some electronics made to do the same job...

The seat unit is going to be a bit problematic. It has to raise the seat height, provide for hiding some of the electrical bits, look like it belongs with the tank and at the same time it has to say "Cafe Racer" loudly enough to overcome a certain amount of handle bar prejudice that is sadly rampant in the population at large.

And it has to do all that well.

What I really need to do is to buy myself one of those big wall planners, and mark in the deadlines for the stuff I write. That way I'd probably spend less of my time in a low grade panic. I needed to do something for an article, so I started making a random petrol tank, and there's only so much metal bashing I can comfortably put up with in one week, and I'm not massively attracted to the idea of doing a job more than once. So, as you might imagine, the prospect of bashing out the third version of the front mudguard for the R65 didn't fill me with enthusiasm.

So, I went shopping instead. I needed some bits and bobs to finish off the rear sets, and chased most of them down on the Internet. I was a little dubious about the left hand thread M6 x 1.0mm stainless steel nuts I bought off of E-Bay arriving in time as it did say "seller usually posts within 5 days", so I stopped off at my local supplier and bought some from them. The Rose joints, two right hand, two left hand thread, were ordered on the Thursday night, and arrived on Saturday, and the left hand M6 x 1.0mm die and die holder were ordered Friday afternoon and showed up on Saturday too. Sadly the other thing that showed up on Saturday, was a hangover.

In some sort of an attempt to rationalise what I was up to, I also decided to do a little more shopping on Saturday, and hunt out a 1930's-40's petrol can, so I could use the neck and brass cap as a filler cap on the random fuel tank I'd started making. The idea being that if I stick with it and finish the tank, then my "To Do" list will have one less thing on it. I did manage to buy two petrol cans, and the forward planning paid off, as I hadn't realised the necks on the can were brass, and I'm going to need to solder them on to the petrol tank.

The upshot of all that was that by about mid afternoon on Saturday, I'd made it to the workshop, clutching two petrol cans, assorted parts for the R65's rear sets, and my head. The logical thing seemed to be to connect the rear sets I'd made to the things that they needed to operate, using the recently arrived bits and bobs and some of the 6mm stainless rod leaning up against the wall by the drill press. Naturally, once I picked up the 6mm stainless steel rod, it turned out to be 6mm mild steel rod.

Luckily Rob has been quite busy lately and was working on the Saturday too. Luckily because one of the things he makes are grilles to protect stained glass church windows from assorted air born hazards, and he makes them out of stainless steel mesh welded to a 6mm stainless steel rod framework. A short walk across the yard, and I had a couple of feet of material to do the job with.

The gear change side of things was relatively straight forward, I cut a thread on one end of the rod, measured it, screwed on a lock nut and the rose joint, and measured from the end of the thread to the centre of the ball on the Rose joint. That told me that with 7/8" of thread, the centre of the Rose joint was 1 1/2" from the end of the thread once the joint was bottomed out. That meant that the centre of the linkage was 5/8" from the end of the rod, and that the overall length of the rod (without the Rose joints needed to be 1 1/4" less than the required centre to centre measurement. Now do you see why the hangover was significant?

I've seen rear sets on Beemers where the controls are positioned not unlike mine, but the brake rod departs from the pedal and travels off to the rear brake. Don't like that, because the rod is so much shorter than the swing arm, not parallel with it, and pivots about a completely different centre, it's all going to be a little prone to conflicting arc issues. Then the ratio of the pedal is all wrong, the standard BMW pedal (or at least the one I have) has a 5:1 ratio, dinky little concentrically pivoted rear set levers make it hard to achieve better than 4:1.

While that lot won't prevent the rear brake from working, it will mean it doesn't work very well. For a little more effort, it ought to be possible to have a rear brake that performs very much like the factory one. My rear set levers have a ratio of 3:1, so I cut the original brake pedal up and welded a piece of 1"x 1/4" strap to it to turn it into a 1.66:1 idler for the brake mechanism. 3 times 1.66 comes to 4.98, and that's pretty close to the original 5.

As well as sorting out the pedal ratio, this also puts the brake rod in the original position where it's pivot is much closer to the swinging arms and the whole geometry of the set up is a lot happier and the rear brake set up now uses the original pedal stop. I might add that while the maths was getting more complicated, the hangover wasn't getting any better...

As you can imagine then it came as something of a relief to go back to making the link rod from the rear sets to the idler. Somewhere in the week, I did find the time to make the ends for the pedals, but apparently I didn't find time to swap the zinc plated Phillips screw holding the two sections of the pedal together for a stainless, button headed Allen bolt. I think it's fair to say that the finished thing looks quite a lot like a real one, though for the reasons I explained, they're going to work better than some of the off the shelf "real" ones you see.

Clearly, the original "bolt-on" concept I had for this project is long dead, but I'd like to think that the reasons for that aren't entirely due to my reluctance to part with money. If I feel I can make something that works and/or looks better, then I'd rather make it myself than buy it. That's not because of some misguided idea that you have to make it all yourself, it's simply because I know what I want, and I'm not compromising that by buying something that's only nearly what I want. The other part of the equation, which may come as surprise to people who watch a lot of Discovery Channel, is that it's better to hit some notional target of right, than it is to have it done in some notional period of time.

Since I briefly touched on the "DIY Nazis" in the last paragraph, I'd like to share a closing thought with you. If it doesn't work well, it doesn't matter who made it, it's still crap.

I think I mentioned that I was going to be unexpectedly busy this week, and that BMW related progress might suffer as result. That was before I remembered that my nephew was getting married on the Friday, and my nose was invaded by some sort of nanotech rubber factory. I'm fairly sure there's a rubber factory up my nose. as snot isn't usually thick enough to bounce is it?

I did get the front mudguard made along with some mounting tags to weld to the fork brace as you can see in the picture to the left. Looking at the picture, it doesn't look that bad, but it's not really floating my boat because the radius of it's edge isn't concentric with the tyre.

I've got something over half a sheet of 2mm thick 1050 aluminium that I've been avoiding using for some time now. I suppose that an aluminium mudguard on a café racer is practically de rigéur, and aluminium is much easier to shape than steel so I'm sorely tempted to have another go using the ally.

I can't remember if I mentioned the colour scheme I have in mind? I've been thinking in terms of silver and orange, as when I think of German machinery racing. in my mind's eye I see the 300SL that Stirling Moss, with Dennis Jenkinson as co-driver, drove to win the 1955 Mille Miglia. I think it's fair to say that the win was as much due to Jenkinson's invention of pace notes as it was to Stirling Moss' driving. You can read more about it on Stirling Moss' own site.

Hopefully, the silver/orange paint scheme will make the foam air filters look a little less lurid. Though, in fairness, considered as a whole, and if you can picture the exhaust in black, and the earlier type rocker boxes in place, the overall effect is quite pleasing I feel.

During the course of the week, the nice people at Spectrum Contract Vinyls sent me a sample card of their range of coloured upholstery vinyls, so I ought to be able to find some vinyl for the seat that qualifies as orange without clashing with the filters, and then go and find some paint to work with that.

While I'm brandishing links around, if you're interested in this, you'd probably enjoy yourself at RockerBoxer which is Vanzen's site and has a huge gallery of Airheads both race and café, as well as his own, rather more ambitious, BMW build.

Aside from Version 3 of the front mudguard, I probably ought to get around to doing some shopping for assorted bits and bobs. That said though, I ought to do something about the side stand in the fairly near to immediate future...

I did say I'd try and get something finished didn't I? Well there you have it, one finished set of headlight mountings, and bolt on ones to boot. Though, I did bolt them on, decide that the headlight stuck out too far and that the actual bit the headlight bolted to had all the elegance of a duck in a ballgown, and set out to make some more.

So, despite getting something done, I still didn't manage to make it much of a "bolt-on" operation. To be honest, while I'm claiming that its done, I may visit the new brackets with a selection of drill bits and add a few lightening holes, because the new brackets, while made out of aluminium, are a little on the portly side at a quarter of an inch thick.

The quarter inch ally was the thinnest suitably sized piece I had floating around the place and I'd already been assaulting it with my trusty Bosch jig saw to make the rear sets to the motorcycle.

I machined the footpegs from some 1 3/8" aluminium bar off cuts that I have (courtesy of my younger brother), and I hole sawed out an inner "washer" out of some 3/8" thick aluminium that came out of the scrap bin at Wasp Motorcycles ten or twelve years ago. The footpeg and the washer sandwich a piece of 20mm steel bar which has a 10mm hole drilled through it, and forms the pivot. I made the levers from the afore mentioned quarter inch ally plate, jigsawing them out roughly to shape and then finishing them with a selection of files. The levers are composed of two parts, the obviously lever shaped bit, and a teardrop shaped piece that lives behind it and will connect to the operating rod eventually. The lever has a selection of holes drilled in it and the "teardrop" has two threaded holes in it, which makes the whole set up widely adjustable.

I used the original gear lever to get the dimensions for the ones I made, which ought to mean the gear change feels very much like the standard one to use, as the lever ratios will be identical. The brake pedal is a bit more of a problem as my new lever has a 3:1 ratio and the factory brake pedal has something more like 6:1. That means that if I just hooked the new lever to the back brake, it would take twice the pedal effort to achieve the same amount of braking as the standard set up. It would also mean that the swing arm pivot and the brake rod pivot were nowhere near each other and introduce some interesting conflicting arcs.

To get round that, I'll make an "idler" lever that mounts in the same place as the factory brake lever, and has a 2:1 ratio, which will reduce the pedal effort and put the rod that actually operates the brake back in its original position, reducing the conflicting arc troubles to a minimum. I need, or at least want, to get some stainless Rose joints (Heim joints in the USA) to make the linkages. My dilemma there is whether to spend some extra money and buy a left hand tap and/or die so I can adjust the linkages without removing them.

The Tap and Die Co. in London has left hand 6mm x 1.0mm taps for £10 each, and the dies for £20 each, which is tempting, and once I'd bought them, I'll doubtless use them again.

Making the rear sets did consume most of the week, but in fairness to me, everyone who's looked at the polished items in the flesh has assumed that I bought them.

The other thing I made a start on was a front mudguard. In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I cut out a flat blank and fold the edge over while it was flat to see if I could make a mudguard by just stretching the middle without shrinking the edges.

"Yes I can" was the result of the experiment, but getting it to fit the BMW's 18" front wheel wasn't happening, although it was an admirable fit on my 21" Harley Davidson wheel.

Having found that particular orphan child a home, I went back to making one the usual way and shrinking the edges as well as stretching the middle. You can see the edge of the blank starting to ruffle up as I make the second pass along it with the arbor press. I made the nylon tooling and I have four different ones with varying amounts of "crown" on them, and I use them in the press to either force the metal into a hole in a piece of MDF to make a dent and stretch the material, or I use them on a flat piece of 1/4" steel plate to shrink the ruffles around the edge, or planish out the dents.

What I'm trying to end up with is a mudguard that has a cross section to match the "hoops" of the fork brace and a radius that closely matches that of the tyre once it's been fitted to the fork brace.

I find myself unexpectedly busy next week, so I may not have time to make a lot of progress. Though, the carburettors still need some cleaning, and soda blasting is something that needs looking into I think...

I mentioned something about making a more elaborate bracket for the fork brace I'd made in the previous post. In theory, I should have been a bit too busy to manage that, but I managed to combine what I was busy with and making the brackets for the fork brace under the same umbrella.

Aside from the lack of paint, I think it bears more than a passing resemblance to a real one. That's not really a surprise as making motorcycle accessories of this type was my day job for a while, and I've had a bit of practice at it.

By now, my original idea of unbolting some stuff, bolting some other stuff on, and having a Café Racer, has mutated somewhat. While the fork brace does indeed bolt on, the original idea would perhaps have been more accurately expressed as "buying some other stuff and bolting it on". In a completely predictable turn of events, that has become "making some other stuff and bolting it on".

I always planned to make the exhaust myself, and while the "nest of snakes" idea wasn't viable with the radius of bends that I can make in 1 1/2" tube, I wasn't so wedded to the idea that I was prepared to sit down and make one by welding mandrel bends together. By the time I'd repositioned the engine (...bolt some stuff on. Ha!) and broken off the threaded exhaust collar on one of the heads, there wasn't a lot of option other than to make one anyway.

Now that I've made a tail pipe and a silencer for the system, I'm reasonably happy with the way it looks, so it's staying for now. I made the silencer from some 3" tube and some hand rolled cones. It has a perforated tube running thought it and that in turn has a washer welded in it's bore which causes some of the gas to be diverted through the perforated tube into the body of the silencer and then back into the tube after the washer. I've made some similar ones in the past and they seem to offer a reasonable compromise between offensively loud, and stupidly quiet, and given that you don't need to burn that much fuel (and hence make that much exhaust gas) to produce the heady 40 whatever HP the R65 manages, I imagine it will work satisfactorily.

I got some exhaust springs from Meredith Motocross so I just need to weld some small wire hoops to the front pipes and drill the fins for those. I'm thinking about seeing if I can get the exhaust aluminium metal sprayed before I paint it black, since it seems to me that heat proof paint sticks better to aluminium than it does to steel.

I've also made a start on the rear sets, and once again I'm making them rather than buying them. Not because any that I bought wouldn't fit my preconceptions, and not because something else I've done would stop off the shelf ones from fitting either. No, this time the reason is simply that I quite like buggering about on the lathe. The adjacent photograph is the sort of thing I've got in mind for the footrests, though I didn't want them to look quite that chunky, on the other hand, I don't want them collapsing in use. I also want to use something other than a bend at the end of the linkages to locate them, not only for the look of the thing, but to provide a little adjustment too.

Strangely, I began this post with the feeling that I'd made quite a lot of progress, it certainly felt like quite a lot of work, but weighing it up now, it doesn't look like very much headway. I think that's because I can't point at anything on the motorcycle (with the exception of the engine mounts) and say "That's finished". The exhaust needs the spring loops fitting, I've got one, potential, footrest for the rear sets, the tank needs mounts making for it, the fork brace need brackets for the, as yet non existant, front mudguard and the subframe (which has been granted a reprieve) still needs some work. I'll make an effort to get something finished and see how I feel about the amount of progress then.

Despite having assorted other things to attend to, I did actually manage to make a degree of progress with the BMW this week. As well as sorting out something on the GS 550 and more things of a one step forwards, two steps back nature on the Alfa trike.

Nothing overly dramatic I'm afraid, although, the tank did arrive. It turns out that an R80 has somewhat different fuel tank mounts than an R65, despite the frames appearing to be identical.

"Appearing to be identical" is deceptive though as the R80 front tank mount appears identical to the R65 one at first glance, but place the tank on the frame, and something is clearly amiss. The front mount consists of a "C" section channel bridging the tunnel of the tank, and a horizontal piece of tube welded to the frame down-tubes behind the headstock, with a rubber moulding that sits on the tube. The tube on the R65 frame is not only slightly longer, it's located lower too, and sitting your long awaited R80 tank onto the mounts reveals that there is no clearance between the starter motor and the fuel tank. Luckily I realised that the mounts were different before despondency set in.

I've got as far as making a new mount for the front of the tank, and I'm thinking of ordering the rubber cotton reels for the rear of it and making some suitable brackets to weld to the frame.

After a ridiculous amount of farting around, the motorcycle now has the makings of an exhaust. I say "an exhaust" as it may not be "the exhaust" since I'm not too sure about the way the pipes run under the engine. I feel they could do with following the line of the sump rather than floating around in mid air like that, which would pull them in a little closer at the front as well. Because the left side cylinder is further forward, the pipes converge to the right of the bikes centre line, making them near as damn it equal length and overall the effect isn't entirely unpleasant, and it seems that I'm the only person who isn't enamoured of it. I think I'm going to take one more stab at it as I have the tube to do that anyway, and the collector I made is a slip on one so that at least could be re-used.


I've also sawn the threaded stub off of the left hand cylinder head, which has left no means of securing the front pipes to the heads. I'm planning on removing the heads and drilling its fins to accept some springs which will hook onto the exhaust pipes, rather like you might see on a moto-cross machine. The pipes I've made are 1 1/2" OD, 1/16" wall, so and I've put short stubs of the 1 3/8" pipes that came on the motorcycle into the ends of those to locate in the exhaust ports.

The final thing I did was to make all the parts for a fork brace. I'd resolved to spend money more freely on this project as opposed to my usual "I can make that..." approach, and I knew you could buy fork braces not unlike this. However, I had been looking at what I had in the way of 7/8" tube formers, and looking at the one on a conduit bender I own, it looked to be about the right size to make the inverted "U" pieces. A test bend revealed that it was, in fact, exactly the right size when used with the tube I had lying around. Making the mounting brackets from some 1" x 1/4" steel strap was going to be easy enough so I made one and tacked it up. I don't really like the strap brackets, and am toying with the idea of jig sawing some from 1/4" plate, which would look better, and make the brace stiffer. It would also give me somewhere to drill some lightening holes, and I find the idea of adding some extra metal so I can drill lightening holes in it vaguely amusing.

The rear sub frame is causing me to lose some sleep. It's ugly, flimsy, and ridiculously heavy for the amount of stiffness it possesses. It wouldn't be beyond the wit of mortal man to make something stiffer and lighter from larger diameter tube and weld it in place, contributing to the overall stiffness of the frame, which is a department where it is sadly lacking. The other side of that coin is that part of what makes a BMW café racer a BMW café racer to me, is that skinny subframe stripped of the side panels and battery mount.

Different is not a synonym for "better", but that doesn't exclude the possibility.

I did get a small amount done this week, but one of the things that slipped through the net was buying some more batteries for my camera, so, no piccies I'm afraid.

I made a start on a fork brace by drilling a couple of plates to attach to the fork's mudguard mounts, and then bending some 7/8" OD 12 gauge tube into a "U" shape to join the two plates together. Which of course sounds very easy until you consider that the bent "U" shapes have to have the same inside dimensions (or at least very close to) as the outside measurement of the two plates they connect.

Since the 7/8" former on my "proper" tube bender has a hopelessly large radius for this job, I ended up using a Record conduit bender as I not only have one, but I have a 22mm former for it too. The former was slightly undersized, which normally entails "over bending" the tube and then pulling on the legs of the "U" to get them parallel again, but as luck would have it, the spring back in the tube itself took care of it for me. That's all on the bike and tacked up, but I'll need to drop the front wheel to fully weld it and take it off the bike for a final trim.

Then I'll make a front mudguard for it that will mount directly to the fork brace.

On the exhaust front, I was face with an either/or choice. Either I made the exhaust out of bent tube as I wanted to, or I had a Snake's Nest exhaust, as I wanted to. While i can make bends up to 180 degrees in the tube, the radius is just a little too large to allow me to bend up a Snake's Nest without cutting and welding the tubes I bend or buying in some mandrel bends.

So, I think for now, I'm going to make a relatively simple 2-1 for it as I don't relish the idea of sitting down for hours at a time welding bends together.

There's a rumour that the fuel tank might turn up tomorrow...