Lovingly restoring the worst bike I've ever ridden.

Correction; A lot of money and a little time.......Ahhh, we all love our personal money pits

Shouldn't be that expensive to turn another steering neck and get it welded on.

When I have a bent motorcycle frame (there have been a few:huh), I use the services of this frame shop (see link), the neck repair/replacement is a piece of cake for this place. Its not cheap but it will come back straight and true.

http://www.drjohnsmfs.com/index.shtml

: Mike

I'm thinking that I know welders that could do that in their backyard....

That's what I was thinking. When we built dad's trike, we tacked everything together in our homebuilt "Jig", but since the wall diameter on the frame tubing was 3/8", we had a welder come finish up. Was very reasonable.

WHEEEEEE This is great work, mulletman.

Prayer and vitamins could'nt hurt either. Good luck.

Whoa, things are definitely happening. I am at Motolab right now. There are many things happening, the vast majority of which I am not capable of doing myself. for example, I cannot make computer models of motorcycle parts, nor can I turn said models into parts. So kind of uhh... I'm here to take pictures, nod and act like I'm definitely totally understanding what is being explained to me. I'm like a labrador with a camera.

Also: my computer had some kind of mental breakdown followed by pooping its drawers, so I will be making all of my posts with my Android for a few days. Please excuse any Swype related anomalies.

Hooray!

That drawring looks lots more rounder than what you're currently sportin'.

(And I don't think that I'll ever tire of seeing that snowy shop of yours.)

You are the second person in the last hour to bring up my christmas-y shop. I still have one 15lb bag of baking soda if anybody wants to buy it from me. All proceeds will go straight to the Minsk. No, really this is a great idea... Everybody start bidding on this authentic bag of Disaster Maker. Now you too can simultaneously destroy your reputation AND garage, just like that nimrod on ADV! I can see it now, every cool ADVer will have a little pouch of baking soda in his panniers for good luck. Happy bidding!

I hope you know that your snow-globe of a shop is just so darn funny because it reminds me of the times when I tried to do right but got it all wrong. A silly example is when I primed a fairing in my apartment, got primer over everything and ruined my favorite Tom Waits album that was playing on the turntable. On the other end of the spectrum is a time when I flooded the basement of an apartment complex back flushing the swimming pool filters (and left to get lunch :eek1).

Ask my dad and he'll give you three dozen more stories of my idiocy.

You were doing everything right (trying to not get soda dust on your neighbor's house/yard) but it turned out all wrong. It's universal. We've all done it a million times (but you have the best pics ).

I heart your thread.

I started following this thread because of the mechanics, and funny times of rebuilding such a beast of a bike... I have some old stuff to work on myself, and these things give me knowledge and motivation.

Now I partially feel obligated to see it through for probably the worst 1 line suggestion in your garage's history

Back at it! That's two days in a row! I should have my new computer some time in the next couple of days, then I will go back and re write all of this and embed the pictures. We have the dog bone in place now and are about to heat it up and beat it back into place!

Woohoo!

I am finally with computer again, so now I can actually tell people what we have been up to.

Everybody remembers this horror show, right? This was the bottom of the neck.


So Derek came up with this




Basically a two piece dog bone/barbell shaped piece. Insert the larger end into the neck, then put the smaller end into the other end of the neck and bolt them together. This ensures that both ends of the neck are in alignment.









Gratuitous Tejava shot


Ta DA!


Doing a test fit of the dog bone


After the test fit we took it back out to weld up the many gaping cracks in the neck.




Ended up with this






Then put it back in, heat it up and start beating the hell out of it






Ended up with this

So of course, after the first round of blacksmithing the neck into shape, we ended up with a few smaller cracks, so we basically repeated the last few steps. Remove dog bone, weld cracks, replace dog bone, pound on things with a hammer.

Once this was done, Derek laid a bead of weld around the circumferences of the top and bottom of the neck






Derek wants the bearing cups to be a light press fit, but when we did a test fit they just dropped right in and kind of rattled around a bit, but a hell of a lot better than what we started with. At this point I would have just shrugged, said "meh" to no one in particular and moved to the next step. I shared my enlightened point of view with Derek, but I think he probably just wished I would shut up.

He rigged this up to check how much play there was. Why don't I have tools like this?


There was 0.003" of play, so he put the dog bone back on the lathe and took 0.004" off of it.


Then more heating and hammering...

Back at Motolab now, I think we might finish the neck up tonight!

So here it is, ready for bearings.




Pressing in the old races as a test, not actually going to use these.


They fit, and they don't rattle around or anything!




Derek would like to point out that he was not the Artiste that did the grinding on the neck. Yup, all me...


Hell yes! things are happening!

Great job!

You and your skilled buddy are lavishing more time and attention on your fine steed than some people might think worthwhile - but some of us understand

Shows what can be done with the right tools and a little imagination. I would've cut the whole neck off and fabbed up a new one but this seems like a good fix as well.

Carry on.

You can jump thru hoops, bend over backwards, make 40 trips to dmv, much money spent trying to title them OR you can simply slap a plate on them from another currently registered motorcycle. I mean, you ain't gonna get pulled-over for speeding on them. I've never had my frame numbers checked by a cop in 40 years of riding.
Other option is cut the steering neck off a titled bike and weld it on the ruskie bike.