Mushroom Shed...Pigsty more like

Now that I've sent the frame off for powder coating I've not got much to do in the Mushroom Shed, which has led me to notice just how untidy I've let it become. So this week I'll be tidying and sorting in preparation for getting the frame back.

Forging ahead.

Yesterday I spent time re-organising the workshop to give me more space. This meant I didn't do any work on the bike. However I did play with my shed-built forge a bit.

I connected the blow side of my shop vac to the forge and checked that that worked.

Even if it's a rubbish forge at least I'll have a ping pong ball levitator...

We'd given a lift to the workshop to some of my OH's friends who were visiting the pottery a couple of units down. They brought some coal with them which I used to build a small fire on the grid of the forge. It took a while to get burning (and a shed load of BBQ fluid) but eventually it lit, switching the shop-vac on made the coals glow nicely...

And allowed me to heat some bar up to red hot.



At this point I was a bit limited by the lack of a suitable anvil, even red hot the breeze block gave way before the rod but I did manage to bend it.

Here is a shot of me being all blacksmithy..

As a proof of concept I think it worked pretty good, but I think there were problems with the choice of fuel. The donated coal was smokeless which I think may have contributed to it being hard to light. I've got some charcoal lying about the place somewhere so I'll try with that at some point.

Who needs oxy gear?

One of the things I've often wished I had in the workshop is oxy-propane gear, cheaper than oxy acetlyene and still good for heating and cutting. However I still can't justify paying rent on an oxy bottle I'd only use a few times a year. So when it came to cutting some steel plate I just used my jigsaw.

I then drilled some holes so I could bolt it to an old brake disc (off a car or possibly van) before sticking it in the lathe, machining the plate into a more round shape and sticking a 38mm holesaw through the middle.

Some more holesaw action on some 38mm pipe and working on an old toast grid gave me this.

The idea is to weld the pieces of pipe together, then weld the pipe to the plate bolted to the disc. That should give me a usable forge for heating stuff up. Total cost 3 quid from the scrappy (and I got some bar and strap at the same time).

I got the idea from Blackjack, you can see his in action here.

Blimey, over a month since my last blog....

... I just wish it was due to a flurry of workshop activity. I don't really know where the time has gone, but it has.

I've started a side project to build a foundry to sand cast parts in aluminium. The logic behind this is that in the long run it will save time as I will be able to sand cast items like my rear brake hanger rather than building cutting, filing, grinding and bolting up from sheets of aluminium. I'm not entirely sure if this argument holds water but what the hell, building a foundry is a cool project and I reckon casting aluminium will be a good way to keep warm in winter evenings.

This is as far as I've got....



Next step is to line it with refractory, which means finding a reasonably priced supply of fireclay. Oh and I'll be needing some kind of crucible, current plan is 4" pipe capped with either a screw on cap (preferred option) or with some plate welded on.

Oh and I sold my house two days ago which means I need to find space for all the crap I had been storing in my old garage. It also means I now have some disposible income so hopefully progress will not be held up while I save for parts/materials/tools.

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.

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.

Finished the bike lift!

Now back to building the bike....