Friday 21 May 2010

New lathe tool

I spent a couple of hours playing with my new diamond tool holder in the lathe producing these (and a load of swarf) the idea is to use them as spacers for the swingarm.




While I was in the workshop I mounted the centres and mops on grinder/polisher. Here is how the swingarm clamps look after 10 minutes with the coarse soap (unpolished clamp included for reference)




The other thing I've been up to is trying to fix my FJ1200. A couple of months ago someone tried to steal it and did this to the ignition lock.




In order to change the ignition lock I had to remove the top yoke, which meant removing the fairing etc. Which is why the FJ looks a bit sorry for itself.




Plan is to get it back together and use it over the summer as there is no way the TriBSA will be finished while the summer is here.

Saturday 15 May 2010

Lack of funds is hindering progress on the TriBSA so I'm planning to use my time on the cheaper tasks of building shop equipment. Spent tuesday night knocking up a stand to mount a bench grinder I'm going to use as a polisher.

First of all I made up a base.....





Centre piece was just there to space things out, once I had the base welded up I welded an upright in place and then welded a couple of pieces of angle to the top of it.




A couple of pieces of strap drilled and welded to the angle gave me something to bolt the grinder to




Finally I removed the grinding wheels and guards to reveal the shafts I'll be mounting the polishing centres on.




You might be able to see that I had to grind off the nut on the LHS. I tried everything to undo it culminating with my rattle gun on max but it wouldn't budge. In the end I attacked it with an angle grinder. I still couldn't get the back plate off as it had been crushed into place so I used the mini air cut off tool on that.

It was only yesterday that I discovered the reason why it had been so reluctant to shift and the mountings had been crushed is because some twat had used a rattle gun running anticlockwise to undo a LH thread.....

I bought a kit of parts to build a blasting cabinet at the Bristol Classic show back in February and I intend to start work on that next. As money is tighter than usual I'm thinking of spraying the frame rather than getting it powder coated and I'll probably be polishing any ally parts for the same reason.