John's 48 paint job pictures

Miss Brittney and I headed over to Mikes to check out how he paints sheet metal. We saw this turtle in the middle of the road, so we stopped to help him out.

Here is Brittney saving the snapping turtles life.

Here is the flight red paint for John's bike.

This is all the sheet metal. It took two weeks worth of work to get everything this far.

The salmon colored stuff on the tin is sealer.

Here is Mike spraying the stuff down with compressed air.

Here is the rear fender with the base coat on. It gets two coats of base coat and two coats of clear

After each coat mike wipes down everything with a terry clothe, then sprays it with compressed air, then puts on another layer of paint

Here is a cool picture of him spraying clear on it. He uses a special clear only gun that has a large spray pattern.

Another picture of clear getting laid down. After this dries, he will wet sand and buff everything, then we get to start finishing up the bike!!!

38 pictures from sunday, exhaust fitting stuff and welding

I did some aluminum welding this morning, here are some missing fins on a 55 head for a motor we are rebuilding.

Here they are after a bit of welding . I love aluminum welding it is like laying down little bricks.

Check out the epoxy that someone used to glue in the cam bushing! wow.

I don't know what to say about this, except never glue in bushings?

I worked on fitting the exhaust on Jim's 38 some today. I have to fit the clamps on the muffler still, but it is almost done.

I still have to fit the clamps on the muffler, but it is almost done. Check out the angle on the pipe going into the saddle it is a smooth transition and the pipe lines up well with the saddle.

Smooth

Check out how nicely the header pipe fits into the head!!!

c.b. to coil wire clip on the center stud. it is supposed to be on the stud to the left. I kind of like the idea of putting it here, it is a little more clean.

My dad and I were pretty excited when Dan pulled the cylinders off of the 38 and we saw the cut down fl pistons. We both hoped that the bottom end had btsv flywheels in it, but we were sadly disappointed. It has 74 wheels in it. I think the pistons were cut down for less rotating weight rather than clearance issues.

Here are the stroker plates. They are .050 thick. The tops of the cylinders had .060 macnined off of them. I am guessing that this was done before the stroker plate.s

I scraped the carbon off the top of the pistons to see how big they are and found that they had been polished mirror smooth, which is pretty cool

HEre is the breather. They must have misplaced the elbow that clamps on the end of it, so they plugged the end and cut these grooves in it.

correct 38 only throwout bearing. This is a good bearing but was replaced by the big bearing in 39. 37 throwout bearings are bigger than this. 36 are three pieces!

This is a later style clutch finger. I thought you always had to use the earlier style fingers with the small bearings, but I guess that is not always so.

Here is the inside of the right case. The left case had the same problem. This motor did not have enough end play and the two races were not in line. This caused the flywheels to roll over a burr on the races and encapsulate the bearing cages inside of the early blind hole races.

pictures from the last few days

Here are the rims for Doug's 39. We should be putting this thing together in the next month or so. Pretty exciting.

Jake came back out to work on the barn. He told me that the concrete business has been tough because of how wet everything was in SD this year. He is trying to fit a summers worth of work into a few months. This is the fill for the floor of the barn.

Here they are putting in some sand. Now they are workin on the pex tubing. Construction is very interesting to me. I am glad that I do not do it for a living but enjoy seeing the processes involved with stuff like this.

One of our friends son is getting married, so we gave him a knucklehead for a wedding gift. Now he can say he is piecing together an old bike. The head in question is a mid 38 to late 39 head.

The intake threads are a little damaged, this will be a challenge to fix.

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This is a 52 motor that we just got in to rebuild. The owner is from PA and had recently had it rebuilt, he said it was making a funny noise so he turned it off and pulled the cam cover and found some cracks.

the end play on the flywheels was ok, but the crank pin was sticking out quite a bit, it was hitting on the case and caused these nasty cracks. It is a real shame because the cases are mint, matched and virtually un touched. We will weld this up and re build the engine.

More crack age. In the letter he sent along with the motor he said that he really wants to ride the bike for more than a 100 miles in a day with out having to worry about it. When my dad called to discuss this with him he asked if he forgot a zero lol

Dan finished up the pipe for the 38, now he can pull the motor and go through it with the others.

piston pin tool, head badge and 47 pictures

It is a great day to go for a ride.

My friend Tim stopped by and showed me this cool ajax head badge for a really old bicycle. It is heavily embossed and sooooo nice looking. I would love to have the opportunity to meet one of the guys that made dies for parts like these. It is amazing craftsmanship.

Here is the tool for installing original style piston clips. It works really well. We just finished up a set of panhead cylinders for a friend and he does not have this tool, soooo....

I made him up a blue print. ifigured it might be of help to some of you guys too. Check it out!

47 saddlebags from Chuck and Jo at the saddleshop

I started mounting the bags on Andy's 47 yesterday and finished them today.

Here they are all mounted up. We sent an original set of bags to Chuck and jo at the saddleshop to copy. They did an amazing job on my sears seat, henderson seat so we figured they could do a good job on the saddlebags. I have never seen craftsmanship like this on leather work. it is so cool.

They copied the latches, plates, rosettes and all the other details. They even made the rivets that hold the plate onto the bag and nickle plated them. The quality of the parts and attention to detail are spot on.

All of the spacing of the rosettes, buttons and rivets are perfect. All of the double stitching is parallel and perfect.
Thanks Chuck and Jo, go to their website at http://www.saddlerestoration.com/ to order yours.

construction pics and 38 stuff from the weekend

This is Ace from Kentucky. He stopped by the shop on Saturday after reading about my dad and I in Hog magazine, HE showed up on his ultra and went right to work helping Dan and I out on the barn. The timing of his visit and his willingness to help out Dan and I was amazing. We made a new friend and got a lot of work done.

Here are the beams that we built for the barn over the weekend. they are 42 feet long and made up of two by twelve boards sandwiching in some type of wood. Dan did all the hard and intelligent work. I made coffee handed him screws, switched batteries and was there for emotional support. I learned a lot just by watching though. construction is cool, especially when you are working within the confines of an existing structure. it is like making cool engines, but on a huge scale.

Ace stayed in the center while we lifted the beam up on each side. We would space it up four feet on one end, then space it up another four feet on the other. etc...

And installed. These upright beams were a super tight fit and are all anchored in. There will be a 14 inch i beam placed perpendicular to these two beams and supported by steel uprights. Construction is very interesting and I am learning a lot. I am glad that I do not do it every day, I think the novelty would wear off quickly.

Dan and Ace did such a good jobon the barn I turned them loose on the 38 project.

Everything on the bike was easy to take apart according to dan and Ace. None of the fasteners have any corrosion in the threads. I saw a bunch of rust and nasty deposits in the intake manifold which makes me feel a lot better about taking the engine apart to prevent damage to the bike upon starting.

This is about as far as Ace and Dan made it on the 38. Dan will finish up the pipe on saturday, then we can throw it in the snow and forget about it in hopes that it will be rusted up and similar to the other side by the time we get the motor rebuilt.

38 motor installed and fin repair pictures from this morning.

I got the motor for Jim's 38 bolted in for good this morning. It turned out nice. It needed an .011 shim on the right front motor mount and 0 on the left. This thing is falling together. THis is always the fun part of building a bike. All of the hard work that takes years is done and the pieces just fall together. woo hoo for final assembly.

Check out the gen strap

Early Skid plate.