Hi everyone,
I have really enjoyed the stories of other airhead bike build up projects, so will be posting mine, the build up of ORGS my Off-Road GS here.
I have a good general idea of what I want, but you'll have to follow along as the plan in my head unfolds. My intention is for ORGS to be a bike I can take on the highway and ride all day long for several days to get to a destination, say Moab, Baja, or Copper Canyon, spend a week or so doing some hard riding on unmaintained back roads, then make it back. I want it to be able to take a wipeout without a lot of damage, or cost to repair. That was a drawback of my GSPD. Windscreens, body panels, handle bars, etc. break and cost a lot.
As a base to start with I have bought this '92 GS with 27,000 miles:
And I got this run down '92 PD with 52,000 for parts:
The first thing I'll work on is to get the frame in order. I took a day to strip the parts bike down. Here is what is left that I'll start to craft into ORGS. It looks like a chicken to me:
I studied some photos of the frame upgrades done by various projects, and came up with these paper patterns, then cut them from metal I bought at the scrap yard:
It took a lot of work to get those gussets cut out using a pneumatic cutoff tools.
I made a digital scan of the finished gussets and I'll make some vector graphic data from them which can then be used by anyone interested to program a CAD controled plasma cutter. What took me several days will be able to be done in a few minutes.
-x3300