The sum total of this week's progress was that I finished making the seat base. That's not to say that I sorted the mounts for it out, just that I made the seat base. In fairness, it is a little more complicated than your average custom built seat base, and it is going to get a little more complicated yet. Since assorted electrical items (mainly the fuses and the battery) are located under the seat, then to my mind they need to be easily accessible. Given that the R65 doesn't have a kick start, and I have a dodgy leg that rather precludes a running bump start, in the event of a flat battery, it would be far less of a disaster if all that was required was a set of jump leads and a slave battery, rather than the use of a complete tool kit to remove sufficient parts of the motorcycle to gain access to the battery. Which is why I've got it in mind to make some sort of latch and catch arrangement to mount the seat. The front of the seat hump has been cut away to provide access to the battery, and the current theory is that the base proper will get some sort of hook arrangement at the front, arranged so that the font of the seat base hooks on, and then the rear is pressed down and a simple spring loaded catch locates that.

While that sounds over the top, I'm fairly sure that the ability to change the light fuse at three in the morning, in the rain, without using any tools, is something that can only truly be appreciated at three in the morning, when it's raining, the lights fuse has just decided to shuffle off this mortal coil and you don't have any tools. In other words, I feel it's not enough for a motorcycle to be nice to look at, it ought to be nice to use too.

As I may have mentioned before, you ought to spend more time riding a motorcycle than you did building it, so it makes sense to invest some more effort in building it if it's going to make using it free of irritations and niggles. Fundamentally the question is, who are you trying to gratify? Passers-by, or yourself?

The result of applying those parameters to designing the seat is that it's quite a complex fabrication, the design and manufacture of the seat hump was less straightforward than it could have been, and the whole thing has taken for ever. That said, it's not uncomfortable to sit on the bare base, which bodes well for the levels of comfort once it's upholstered, and I'm quite pleased with the way it looks so far. I've still got to make the latches and I'll probably have to make the catch too, along with some sort of cable release and a back up for that which is either going to take for ever, or not very long, partially depending on whether or not I can remember what I did with the pack of compression springs I remember having about the place.

I have a tendency to look at the Beemer all week, without doing anything to it, and then have a bit of a flurry on saturday so I have something to write about here. Next weekend though, I'm off to visit my parents so there won't be a saturday in the workshop. Which limits the chances of my actually achieving anything somewhat...

This week, was mostly about not succumbing to temptation. I took a day out and drove around a little, caught up with a few people and bought a brace of Suzuki Bandit lower frame rails, pictured to the left. These are bolt in to make engine removal either easier or possible, I'm not sure which as I've never taken the engine out of a Bandit. The point is the the half lap frame splices will fit together. OK, there's a round hole that won't quite accommodate the 17mm AF nut that us Europeans like to use for 10mm thread bolts, but that's nothing that a simple spacer wouldn't sort out, or possibly some Japanese style 14mm AF 10mm nuts. I'm leaning towards making some long nuts from hex bar and turning one end of them round on the lathe to fit in the recess in the splices.

The temptation I was avoiding was to start work on the frame braces. I have the tube on the shelf, and I'm happier messing around with frames than I am with anything else. As it was I managed to restrain myself to cutting some of the splices free from the Bandit frame rails and making a start on cleaning them up. The two that are bolted together are from the front and rear of the rail, and have a shorter "tail" than the other one which is from the tube that runs across the frame. Not having inspected any of this too closely before buying the parts, I had been expecting to get four half splices from the two rails, and not six, and I'd also imagined that the tails of the splices would be longer. Having acquired a half dozen half splices, it makes sense to think about using one pair on a cross brace in the same manner as the Bandit does. Of course, while the OD of the Bandit and BMW tubes are the same, as yet I have no way of telling what the wall thickness of the BMW frame is, though the R65 frame is purportedly lighter than the frame for it's larger brethren, so possibly has thinner wall tubing.

What I needed to be doing was finishing off the seat hump. Although I'd made the risers for the seat hump to attach to, and indeed drilled some mounting holes, I hadn't addressed the problem of attaching the front of the hump to the riser. Accessibility was the problem, with the nuts tucked up inside the "U" section of the seat riser, and the battery living right next to that. I don't like using captive or welded nuts on frames as it's always a problem if they strip or seize, so I made a pair of small aluminium blocks instead. These were sized to sit up in the "U" of the seat riser, and drilled and tapped to accept a M6 x 1mm bolt.

As well as that, they were drilled through the other face to accept a split cotter pin. The idea being that they were positioned under the seat riser, and the cotter pin passed through some holes drilled in the riser to retain them in place, allowing the seat hump to be placed and the front two mounting bolts fitted. While it's a fiddly thing to make, if the thread ever strips, or the bolt ever seizes and snaps off, removing the split pin will let the block drop out and it can either be repaired or replaced without any damage to the frame. It might sound like over thinking the job just a tiny wee bit, but I absolutely loathe having to sort this sort of thing out when it goes wrong in service be cause someone, somewhere, was too cheap, or too lazy to come up with an answer that had a less troublesome failure mode. Probably a bit of a hobby horse of mine really...

I also made some inroads into making the seat proper, and gave some thought to how that was going to be attached. I'm making it with 1/4" of the steel folded back on itself at the edges, the idea being that the vinyl can be glued and tucked back behind the folds, and then they can be tightened up with a rubber hammer trapping the vinyl in place. Well, if the seat's removable, it ought to look tidy underneath too. Hopefully, I'll get the seat base made and mounted in the course of the week, which will mean that the following week, I can give in to my baser desires, and start bending some tube.

I'm worn out.

Completely knackered, finely lacquered, and entirely cream crackered.

The usual period of rushing around to get everything that needs writing, writ has been upon me. With that out of the way and assorted other things moved along to various degrees, I did manage to find the time to drill some holes in the BMW, ten of them to be precise.

Of those ten, eight were for mounting the seat hump to the subframe. I've agonised over this for some time, fretting over access to the battery and so on. But, at the end of the day, if it's going to be a problem, then I can always wire an Optimate plug in to the motorcycle. Which still left me needing to think about how the seat was going to attach to the seat hump, but I think I've figured that out too.

The two remaining holes were for switches. I wanted to keep the factory ignition lock with its folding key with the (albeit nearly worn away) BMW logo, and I'd planned on fitting it in the front left hand corner of the battery tray I made. I also wanted to put the lights ON/OFF switch in the same area, which meant I needed two holes in the battery tray.

Where you're using a key switch, the hole it goes in is usually quite important. These are almost inevitably circular holes with a couple of flats on either side. The temptation is to drill a round hole that the switch will fit in, and rely on the locking collar being tightened enough to prevent the switch from turning.

Ha. Ha. Bloody Ha-Ha.

This NEVER works. Inevitably the switch comes loose and rotates freely in the hole, at the least making it unpleasant to use, and at the worst shorting out the wiring and setting the entire plot aflame.Aside from the avoidance of conflagration, taking the time to file a hole that at least resembles the correct shape means that you end up with a motorcycle that is more pleasant to use than it might have been otherwise. I could elucidate on that point, but as I may have mentioned, I'm tired, and either you see what I mean, or you're the sort of person who drills a round hole and thinks that's good enough.

With the hole filed out for the key switch, I moved on to drilling the hole for the ON/OFF switch for the lights. Because I wanted this tucked up out of sight, but still reasonably accessible, it turned out the the hole needed to be drilled very close to the top edge of the front of the box. That can cause problems with the drill wandering off in the direction of least resistance and breaking out of the material. The difficulties imposed by the shape of the tray added their own portion or amusement to the entire episode.

So, while ten holes doesn't actually sound like a huge amount of progress, it can certainly be more work than it sounds.

The picture to the left, is the Acewell 1500 digital speedometer and rev counter. I'm rather enamoured of the whizzy bar rev counter display it possesses and so I think I shall be ordering one up in the not too distant future.

The other imminent purchase is the frame splices. I've got the tube on the rack to make the braces for the frame, but I really want to get hold of the splices before I start on that, and I ought to make the seat base and get that attached before I set out to deal with the frame.

Once again, I didn't get round to doing much this week. Well I say that, but more accurately I didn't get round to doing much BMW related stuff. Getting the splash tray welded into the seat hump, and making a start on a template for the seat base was about the sum total of my efforts. Any progress is better than no progress though, so I suppose it could have been worse. What I did manage was to wheel the motorcycle out into the daylight, and get a proper look at it. To get the full benefit, I also whipped the rocker covers off to fit the old style ones I bought, and fitted the foam air filters to the carburettors. On the whole, I think its going to look suitably purposeful once it's all done.

Even the lump of the battery tray hanging down under the seat seems to work visually adding some interest in what would otherwise be a totally empty area.

The engine is going to need some further shaving along the top of the crankcase, which will expose the starter motor and leave a more clearly defined gap under the fuel tank, as it is, the angular front top corner of the crankcase very nearly disappears up under the tank. Once it's all painted, the seat hump and fuel tank should suggest a single shape and I like the way that shape is separated from the rest of the motor cycle, or at least would be if the front top corner of the crankcase wasn't there...

Getting a good look at the seat hump, and it's Land Rover rear light was definitely worth the effort of getting the motorcycle outside. I'm really pleased with the way it looks. The old style rounded rocker boxes sit better with it all than the squared off ones the motorcycle left the factory with too.

I'm toying with the idea of fitting indicators to the motorcycle, specifically, bar end mounted ones. There's ample room for mounting electrical components, both under the seat and the fuel tank as well as in the battery tray. That's going to mean a bit of thinking about switch gear though, I don't want to use the standard switches because they're quite plasticky and multicoloured, I want something that looks more engineered than designed. Some stainless steel, push to make, microswitches is what I have in mind, with some sort of latch on, self cancelling arrangement for the indicators. but having indicators will mean I need two switches by each of my hands so mounting them might be an issue. I've resolved not to think about that until I've got the switches in my possession.

I've found a pair of piggyback Marozocchi shock absorbers that I'll use for the R65, they're currently holding up the rear of my Z650. I'm not a big fan of robbing one motorcycle to get parts for another, so I am keeping my eyes open for a set. Whether I end up buying a set for the BMW, or a set for the Zed will depend on the timing.

Although it's not too difficult to appreciate on an intellectual level that the project is moving forwards, appreciating it on an emotional level is a different kettle of fish. Getting the motorcycle outside where there's room to stand back and take the whole thing in, as well as natural light, makes it a lot easier to see that you're not only making headway, but making it in the right direction too

It's August, which means that there are social events to attend, the local bike show to go to, and Trev's Seat Toledo to weld up.

The upshot of all that is that I'm usually busy and towards the end of the month, quite tired. So busy and so tired that I haven't had time to get anything done on the BMW, although I think I have decided what I'm doing with the frame.

In the light of all that, and working on the, not entirely unwarranted, assumption that anyone who takes the trouble to read this has at least a passing interest in things relating to café racers and BMWs, I thought that a wander around some of the web sites that I discovered whilst stealing ideas, sorry, "researching", BMW cafe racers on the Internet might be an idea. Had the project followed the original "unbolt some stuff, bolt some other stuff on" premise, then that would have made it simply a procession of adverts for commercial sites that I'd bought my bolt on stuff from. Since, as is the wont of the plans laid by mice and men, that all went wildly awry, then I feel quite comfortable with the idea.

Firstly, there's the TI Boxer. The name is a little deceiving because it's not a titanium BMW, but the Team Incomplete BMW built by Gregor Halenda and friends. There's a pretty good account of the build on the web page, with plenty of explanation of the frame mods, and a wiring diagram. If you've never even seen a picture this motorcycle in passing before then you're in a minority of about 3 people I would have thought. It is a remarkably handsome motorcycle (I know this because a lot of people have remarked on how handsome it is) and I was sorely tempted to copy the exhaust layout right up to the point where I realised I couldn't quite do it by bending tube, and I'd have to buy some mandrel bends if that was what I wanted. If you understood what I meant when I said I wanted to build something that looked like a BMW that was going racing, and not a race bike with a BMW engine, the TI Boxer was probably a major influence on that too.

Over at http://www.rockerboxer.com/ a gentleman known simply as Vanzen has been documenting his BMW café racer build. Apart from documenting his (even more radical) frame alterations, Vanzen has galleries. Around 11 at the last count, each containing something on the order of 30 or 40 images of BMW cafe racers from around the world. This man has a lot to answer for in my book, because it was trawling through his galleries that led me to the conclusion that shifting the engine in the frame was what I needed to do. If it's crossed your mind to buy a BMW and build a café racer, then Vanzen's "Boxers at Large" galleries are an invaluable tool in deciding where you're going with the idea. You might like to show your gratitude by buying a "Disciples of the Luftkopf" T Shirt from him.

That's BMW's, but if you're after cafe racer parts, then there's a name that you may not have heard of, but for the real hardcore, been building these for ages, UK based, cafe racer die hard, it's synonymous with café racers and has been for decades. Unity Equipe in Rochdale. More commonly associated with Tritons, Unity still offer many of the generic café racer parts that used to be common fayre in small motorcycle shops in the UK. Certainly if you're at all interested in café racers you're likely to enjoy leafing through their catalogue which you can download here. If you live outside Europe, bear in mind that the prices in the catalogue include 17.5% VAT (sales tax) which you won't have to pay, making it all quite a bit cheaper than it looks.

Even if you're not thinking about building a café racer (BMW derived or otherwise) there's a fair bit to keep the average enthusiast occupied there. Hopefully, this enthusiast will find the time to finish up the odds and sods related to the seat hump. The other thing that I need to deal with is finding some frame splices. As it stands, changing the oil filter requires that the engine be removed (or at least detached) from the frame, adding some frame splices to make the right hand frame rail removable would make that particular piece of routine maintainence a lot more routine and at the same time would mean that removing the engine was less likely to be affected by any frame stiffening. Attending to the frame is the next major job, and the splices are crucial to the whole thing.

Having established that I'm perfectly capable of letting a week go by without managing anything on the Beemer, and hot on the heels of that establishing that I'm forgetful and easily distracted, then I suppose it behoves me to try and get my act a little more together.

One of the problems with Version 1 of the seat hump was that it didn't really lend itself to any immediately obvious rear light solution. Version 2 more was more or less crying out for a round rear light from the very outset. Despite my avowed intent to spend some money on this build, I still found that looking at motorcycle rear lights induced spasms in my wallet handling muscles when my eye happened upon the price of them. So I bought a Land Rover Series 2 one for an entirely amenable sum that was a little under £8.

Sadly, while the light unit would fit on the flattish part of the seat hump, once again, it didn't really look right. However, mounted on the curved bit of the seat hump, I looked a lot better, but stuck out too far. The obvious solution was to tunnel the rear light into the metal work of the hump, which meant holesawing it in the relevant place. When I turned the hump over, I remembered that I'd marked the centre line of the the centre section of the hump in felt pen, and further more I'd marked the point where it stopped tapering in towards the rear. I spotted all this after I made a wild stab at where the centre of the light should go with one finger, put the finger of the other hand inside the hum and opposite the first finger, and then turned the hump over, to find that the "blind" finger was on the point where the two lines I'd completely forgotten about crossed.

At this point, you might be thinking that was lucky, which in itself was true, but I have to point out that the more I practice, the luckier I get.

Once I'd made a dirty great hole in my new seat hump, I used the same 3 3/8" (I think) holesaw to cut out another hole from some of the 18 gauge steel I'd made the hump from, and kept the "washer" from the middle of the hole. With it firmly clamped down I lined up the pilot drilling and enlarged the hole in the middle with a 1 3/8" holesaw. Once I'd de-burred it, that gave me a base for the light to sit on. then I cut a strip of the 18 gauge that was about 5" wide, and something over a foot long.

Basically, I cut it so that it was wide enough to roll into a tube that disported horizontally would easily fill the hole in the seat hump, and I chose it because it was long enough to wrap round the piece of 3" diameter tube I found for a former. I used the 3" because steel tends to spring back from where it gets bent to, and I wanted a tube that my 3 3/8" washer would sit on the end of. This would form the basis for a plinth for the light, with the rolled tube having the same OD as the light unit's base.

At that point, since it was starting to look like it would all turn out happily in the end, I thought I'd best weld the three pieces of the hump together. I do possess a TIG, but I often can't be bothered to drag it all out of the corner, it costs a bloody fortune to run, and with my dodgy leg I have trouble keeping my body stable enough to do a tidy weld, so I MIG'd the seams by more or less joining up a series of tacks. Not ideal, and while I could have set things a little lower and used short runs of weld, that requires that you don't wobble about while you're welding.

The picture shows the raw, untouched welded seam on the left, and the right hand one has been dressed back flush with a sanding disc on the angle grinder.

Once the seat hump was fully welded and sanded, I took the light mounting I'd made and offered it up to the seat hump to get some idea of where I wanted it to sit. I decided on having the plinth protruding from the hump by what is probably a little less than 1/4". Having thought about how I was going to weld it all together, I cut the plinth off with a hacksaw so that there was about an inch of tube behind the face the light sat on. Then I took the off-cut and cut it down the seam so it would sleeve over the light mounting. I arranged this sleeve so that the open end of the light plinth was flush with the sleeve, leaving the face of the mount sat in the tunnel.

That whole assembly was then inserted into the hump and positioned so that it looked the way I wanted it too and I could mark the "tunnel" to the profile of the hump. Once I'd used the tin snips to trim the tunnel to that line, I tacked it in place and used the sanding disc on the grinder to finesses the edge before fully welding it in place.

By welding the open end of the tunnel and the plinth together, I didn't have a weld bead interfering with the fit where the light mounting face met the side of the tunnel. It might have been better to weld that up prior to welding the tunnel in, but welding it after, although it meant that I could get all the way round the join, meant I could still tweak the amount the the plinth protruded from the hump. With the light mounting dealt with, I folded the "spare" material I'd allowed at the bottom of the hump through 180 degrees and hammered it flat to give the open bottom edges a finished look. I do this on the edge of a flat surface with a pair of Vise Grips, working the lip a little at time and folding it through no more than 30 degrees at a time until it reaches 90 degrees, when it's time to start using the hammer on it. At the corners where I was trying to force a lot of metal into a smaller space and I had the weld to deal with, I folded it over to about 45 degrees, and carefully cut a "V" out of the lip with a hacksaw, taking care to leave enough of the lip to be able to make it fold the rest of the way.

That was, admittedly, a lot of work to mount a rear light, and, let's face it, the whole thing has been a bit of a rigmarole. And at that, it's still not over and done with as I've yet to make the base for the upholstery, make something to keep the worst of the water out of the hump, and work out how to attach all of this to the frame.

But, I think that in the end I managed to make something that looks like it belongs with the rest of the bike. I recently described the idea I have for the bike in an E-mail to someone as "looking like a BMW that's going racing, and not a race bike with a BMW engine". An essential part of that was that the seat unit looked like it belonged on the bike.

As I mentioned, there's a little more fiddling about to do, what with making a seat base, figuring out mountings, and so forth. When that's out of the way, I'll turn my attention to the frame and see if I can stiffen that up a little.

After falling from grace, and not achieving anything last week, I thought I ought to make an effort to do something concrete this week. The obvious candidate for a slapping was the nefarious seat hump, now that I've got the fuel tank located, and made some provision for supporting the seat base at the correct height.

I briefly touched on my idea that the actual metal shaping isn't the hard part of this, and that the real skill lies in conceiving the shape, in a previous post. I also mentioned that I wanted the seat hump to look like it belonged with the rest of the motorcycle.

Given that the motorcycle is German in origin, and that the Germans aren't renowned for their automotive styling, that seemed to offer a clue as to why I felt that the last attempt at a seat hump didn't float my boat. In short, it lacked Teutonicness.

This is what the first effort looked like. On the whole, not offensive, or even particularly unpleasant I feel, but it doesn't seem to belong to the rest of the motorcycle.

It's a bit much to expect to come up with, and then craft, a shape which sat on a shelf on its own would prompt an interested observer to remark that it looked like it belonged on a BMW, but after a while I came to feel that in this case, the observer would be more likely to say something along the lines of "No, what's it for really?" if they were told it was for BMW.

Rather than just remake the hump, I also folded up a new seat base from some 16 gauge steel as getting the tank positioned and the seat height sorted meant that I would have needed to change the shape of the lower edge on the old one, and it was less trouble to make a new one than it was to weld a couple of pieces onto the old one.

Basically, throw it all away, and start again. Not something I like doing, but needs must when the Devil drives. I kept the original steel template I'd made and clamped it back in place for another look. It's shape had been based on the rear of the R80 tank as some sort of start point. The basic premise behind the template was that if it echoed the tank, then it ought to look like it belonged on the motorcycle.

Slightly simplistic you would have thought. What I ended up doing was simplifying it even further by squaring off the back corner of the template so that the lower edge of the hump didn't curve under. Slightly to my amazement, this seems to have worked.With the shaped pieces just tacked together and sprayed black so the hump didn't contrast with the tank, it all looked quite a lot like it might have actually been made by BMW. I left about 3/8" of "spare" along the lower edge so I could fold it back on itself and not leave a raw edge, so the finished result should be a little shallower than the picture shows.

Finally, I'd like to apologise for what I can only describe as the unmitigated asshattery of typing this post and then, for some reason lost in the mists of last week, saving it as opposed to publishing it. Bugger.