hmmmmm

And the journey begins.....

BLITZKRIEG

AKA Massic's Massacre

Jared rode hard. So hard that on one run he broke the throttle cable from pinning it as hard as he could. Cruising speed for him was 80 to 90 MPH. And on a 400cc Hondamatic that's pushing it to the limit. A bike like that should top off at around 65 MPH. On this grim night the oil supply was getting low and the RPMs were high...

It's time to put this bad boy in the corner and start working on this one.

This one is way more suited to 80 to 90 MPH.

Fork Lowering on the Phsyco 78.

I got the forks cut down a bit this week.

Here's all the guts... You can see the 2" I cut off of the compression spring.

Here are the spacers I machined out. I've used PVC pipe before but it just doesn't feel right to me. Aluminum wasn't the best option, I'd rather have used brass, but I couldn't dig any up...

Here it is all lowered.

Axle Clearance

Somewhere along the line of designing my axle adjusters I messed up a few dimensions. I'm not really sure how I muffed'em up but this is what I did to fix the problem.

Problem #1 Axle slot was a little (.012") to small to except the axle. I thought about opening it up with a diegrinder but thought that's the caveman way, and I'm a freakin' Machinist! So I stuck it in a vice and milled a flat on one side, then flipped it over and milled a flat on the other side.

It's kinda hard to see, but the flat is there... Only thing I can think of is that I miscalculated when I was converting MM into inches. Anyway, problem solved... The cool thing about it is I only need one socket when I'm snugging up the axle nut because the flats hold the axle. Nice....

While I was cutting up my axle I decided to clean up the years of beating on the end of the axle. So I chucked it up in the lathe and dolled her up.
 Before

 
After

I cut a little center into the end so my drift wouldn't mar the end up anymore.

I had to cut down the aluminum sliders and the flange on the head of the axle and the axle nut. I didn't get any pictures of this part but I did take some of the end result.

I'm not to stoked on how far the end of the axle sticks out of the axle adjuster... I'd like to make a cover to go over it at some point. But for now I think I'll just rock out with my axle out. I guess when the time comes I'll have to make a new axle to fit in inside the axle adjuster with a cover. That way the cover will stop the nut from coming off the axle. For now I'll just throw a hair pin in there for a touch of class.

Oh yeah, I had to shave a socket to fit the axle nut...

Thanks to the lovely Betty Page for modeling this handsome tool.

Busy day at the shop.

So me and Jared had a pretty productive day today. We met up at 8 in the morning and went on a 3 mile jog. (gotta keep all this tight yo) After that we finished up a few odds and ends on the frame jig.

This is the lower frame rail carrage that locates the bottom rails and keeps it all buttoned down tight.

Here we have the axle plate locators.

Then we stopped at Barber Metals and picked up some speed metal. Soon, this rusted out metal will be flying down the road at like 240 miles per hour! Crazy shit...

We also got material for the new axle adjusters. I'm crazy excited to get these done!
Then we headed over to the shop to disassemble the Psycho 78' and prep it for surgery.

We used a cherry picker to try and simplify the process... No dice... It's still a bitch no matter how you do it.

Oh snap! some one wasn't getting along with this pig...

This is for your eye's only... Nekked frame, I hope your all 18 years old...

So STOKED!!! We got the frame jig done!!! It holds the frame nice and straight. I wish we could have busted  the sawsall out and gotten started with the choppin,  but we didn't have any plumb bobs on hand and we wanted to make damn sure our alignment was spot on. Tomorrow we are going to cut off all the unnecessary bits. Then we're going to mock it up with conduit so we know where to make all our bends. Being that we were forced into stopping progress on the frame we turned out attention to the computer and geeked out on the design software.

Jared worked his magic and turned my sketch into a 3D cad model. I'm pretty sure he claimed that he hates me at leased 460 times... But I know he has nothing but love for me... :) Now that its done it's off to the period perfect CNC machine for some good old fashion computer numerically controlled machine time... Pre war style! Seriously... There is a reason we don't sand cast shit any more... Because it ain't no good son! Our shit will last yo!