If I had the opportunity to vote on the paint scheme I would say................... LEAVE IT 100% AS IS as far as dimension. The final product will be a thing of beauty Gray pin striping will really set it off and give you more profile definition

 

Awesome build so far. How was the wide glide install? Pretty straight forward? I'm looking at the Vulcan as well. Is that gonna be ready for americade?

 

We'll see. Still kicking ideas around.

 

Thanks Lilbush. The Vulcan kit was not as easy as I had hoped due to them shipping me the wrong size axle and spacers...twice. After the second wrong axle arrived Ozzie just put it on the lathe and turned it to the right dimensions. Aside from that, it went on easy and the parts seem to be good quality. The billet aluminum clamps are thick and well made, and they look good on the bike. If I have an issue with them it's that once you've got the forks in and tightened up they are a bitch to get them back out again. There are no exposed pinch bolts. The mechanism for locking the forks in the clamps is a cam-loc system that's hidden on the back side of the clamps. It looks good but once it's tightened down I have a hell of a time getting them to loosen up again. And of course, with this build I've had them on and off several times, and will again before we're through.

As for Americade...I wish...

 

Is that fully wired Ergo? If so it looks SUPER clean! Very few bikes have the area behind the rear jug that "see through"! I dig it!

 

Thanks man, ya that's pretty much the way the area behind the rear cylinder is gonna look. We're still talking about doing some mod work on the side cover to hide even more of that bundle, but I don't know if we're gonna get to it. And I've got some of that wire wrap mesh that Midlife suggested on order so I'm gonna try some of that to give it a better look.

 

I worked with Oz until 1am Saturday morning and then again for about four hours on Saturday afternoon. We got a lot accomplished.

First, I decided I wanted a more durable/professional upper fork tubes cover than the black parachute cord I used last year. A while back I saw a picture of a blacked out Harley with the upper fork tubes as wide as the outer edge of the triple clamps, and I really liked the look. So I dug around in the pile of left over metal tubing and found what I needed to make the fork tube covers just wide enough.

First I found a length of steel tubing with an ID just big enough to slip over the 39mm fork tubes. It's thin walled tubing and I apologize, I didn't measure the size of the tubing so I can't give the specs for it. But it fit the forks perfectly. Only thing is it wasn't thick enough to bring the overall width out to the edge of the triple clamp. So I rooted around for a few more minutes and I found another length of pipe who's ID was just a few thousandths over the OD of the first length of pipe. Slipping one inside the other, they're a perfect fit. I rough cut them and then turned the ends on the lathe to square them up at just a few thousandths over the measurement between the upper and lower clamp when they're tightened down. Sand blasted the outer tubes and , painted them gloss black, greased the inner tube both inside and out, slipped them together and mounted them up.






Next, Oz finished fabbing the LED tail light/rear fender mounting bracket and the coil mount. I blasted both of those and painted them. The coil bracket is flat black high heat paint and the bracket for the tail light is gloss black. I didn't mount either of them yet because I need to get some new ss hardware for them.







Guess I forgot to take a pic after I painted them....

Finally, we worked on the bars. I decided to go with a simple and straight forward T-bar set up, internally wired, inch and a quarter tubing, 4" straight risers, 28" wide and about 15 degree bend in the bars. I just couldn't warm to anything crazy, too high or too low but wanted a narrow, aggressive look. The angle of the bars will roughly parallel the tank line. Nothing fancy, but, Ozzie couldn't let them go without a couple of really sweet mods. First, we've ordered an internal throttle, which hasn't arrived yet. Second, we're getting rid of the stock switches for turn signals, high/low beam, horn, etc, and he's going to build those right into the bars and we're going to modify the stock levers similar to what mreed did in one of his threads. That, along with a bar end mirror for the left side and the bar end turn signals should look nice and clean. And last, but not least, and the thing that took most of the time Friday night, he has machined out the center of the bars between the risers to mount the dummy lights. The bars aren't done yet but we made good progress on them considering all the fab work on the milling machine to get the dummy light mount close to finished up. I'm not going into all the detail on how he crafted this mount. It was a lot of work, a lot of milling, and a lot of grinding to get it right. I had to file down the stock dummy light mount a bit so that it would fit, and, well...I don't have time to explain the whole process now, but here are some pics I managed to take.






That's it for now. It's coming along. Next weekend we hope to finish up the bars and start on the exhaust.

 

Awesome work!

 

Thanks Robbie.

 

WOW! Just when I think this can't better you find a way to do something new and cool.