More parking garage photos from yokohoma

Check em out. The first tank of the white tank on the Btsv is the best patina paint job I've ever seen. I uploaded a pic of my friend yugins op thirty seven for comparison Japanese people are so smart

out with the old and in with the new or is it the other way around????

 Justin brought this 47 down today.  It used to belong to his dad, who unfortunately passed away.   His family took it apart eight years ago so that they could rebuild it and restore it, but they never got around to putting it back together.   They actually brought the bike down with the tanks, and back fender off and the motor and transmission out of it.  I just spent a half hour loosely bolting them back on for storage purposes.  

 So basically this bike is a 47 el, with a really high serial number it is 47el116xx which almost puts it into 48 production.   The dash cover and gas caps were replaced, but it still has the correct speedometer and ignitions switch

 Check out the sticker on the tail flap,   Also notice that the fender flap and tail light are not correct for 47,  they came off of a 51 to 54 panhead.  

 The original m35 carb and aircleaner got misplaced sometime over the years, the oil lines were switched out too

 Here is the front view,  its a little banged and tweaked up, but it is all fixable stuff.   The headlight is an original cycle ray light, it just had the sealed beam car light fixated to the original bucket

 I wasnt really sure what the blue thing on the handle bar was,  upon closer inspection, Jesse and I discovered that it was an old roll of electrical tape that had been put on the bar that shrunk down into nothing.   Justin told me that his dad bought this bike in the early seventies and rode it a lot, he finally parked it in the eighties after one night when he filled the tank with race fuel and broke some tabs on the heads while trying to keep up with some import bike.   I love old stories like this.

I posted pictures of this 47 for sale a month or so ago.   We sold it with in  2 or 3 days.  It was set up for a sidecar and had a three speed with reverse transmission,  The new owner did not buy the sidecar so consequently he wants to put a regular 4 speed gear box in it.   We are in the process of switching out the gears and also building up a set of 18 inch wheels and tires for it.  I will post some more pics later.

and finally I figured since it is saturday night I would post a pic of Duke getting wild.

metal filler

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Here is the front motor mount on Paul's 37 frame, it is a new vtwin mount which is a forging and tough as nails.   The dimensions are all corect, but the aesthetics are off.   Sometimes you run into an issue like this, where you have a nice reproduction part that is functional but needs a few features tweaked to make it look more like the original.   In this pic, the mount has already been welded to the  frame with steel filler rod, the first pass of sillicone bronze rod is already on, and I have to make a few more so that there is something for Jesse to file off.

 Here is the nearly finished mount.  1936 and 1937 frames have brazed front motor mounts, so there wont be any welding on this one.  I still have to put a couple tacks on the added mount to make it look authentic.  This is a lot of work, but it turned out really nice.

 This is a similar problem,  This frame is for Doug's 39,   some chopper momo  ground these lips off of the casting.

 Here is a pic of the filler on top

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And here it is after Jesse filed it down.

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This is the rear fender mount,  you can see that the horn button looking joint cups got sanded down,  this was definitely done to make somebody's bike more custom back in the day

 Here they are all done.   They are only tacked on the bottom of the frame on frames from 1936 to 1946. This is a lot of work, but its worth the effort.

Here is dougs frame all done.  It has new bottom rails, original loops installed and a new seat post and brake cross over shaft.   This is the frame that was in the jig during my wedding for those of you that came.

63 flh teardown

Jesse started to take Andy's sixty three apart whim brittney my dad and I were in Japan. This is a bike he was piecing together with his favorite parts from different bikes the only problem was that they didn't necessarily fit together very well. We are basically tearing it down and going through the mechanical parts of it putting stock style duals on it, buckhorn bars, a s and s carb and ditching the seat spring s. It will be a super fun bike to cruise around on and have fun with.

The motor had never been run after a fresh rebuild. I took a pic of the cracked exhaust area of the head. Both of thes heads were cracked in the same spot. It's a bit of a common issue expect ally when people put to big of guides in the head. The rod bearings were put in incorrectly. Which is pretty interesting. This project will have food before and after pics. Stay tuned

Some pics of bikes in the parking garage at Yokohama

The moon eyes hot rod and custom show is amazing. I can't put it Ito words. The bike and cars that show up their are detailed out to the highest level. We spent the day before the show going around and checking the bikes out so that we had time on sunday to check out the bikes that got ridden to the show by the locals

Lock and I spent a couple hours ooing and awwing at all of the awesome bikes. There were so many bikes downstairs it seemed like every corner you went around there were another three dozen fresh and clean custom bikes. If you guys ever have the chance to go to the show. You should try to make it a priority. It was a life changing experience for our crew

The all white thirty seven el

While we were in Japan we were lucky enough to get to hang out with our friends yugin and Sumino. Yugin just bought the nicest original paint thirty seven in the World. He picked put group up on Tuesday and we got to hang out and go to a bunch of different shops that I'll post about later. After we went to the shops we went to check out the all white beauty. After staring at it for about an hour he said I could take it for a ride. This was the best part of my trip. I had loved this bike for a Lon time and I actually got the chance to take it for a spin. The bike works like it is brand new and is very fast. Thanks yugin and Sumino

test post from yesterday

Japan is amazing. I love it here the people are so nice and easy to talk to. There are no attitudes and everyone loves old motorcycles. We have done a weeks worth of Neat and exciting stuff every day that we have been here it's Soo much fin. I've taken over a thousand pics and will be able to post about Japan for quite. Whike. Here are some cool pics of us with friends from yesterday. I'll do more on depth oats when I get back o the states.