Sure doesn't look like much right now, does it? Sadly it's not, even though this bare frame it represents a decent amount of work already.
It probably started out its existence looking something like this:
and has probably been shoveled from owner to owner over 25 years, gradually degrading in appearance and capability until 5 or so years ago when a guy in the midwest decided that it was satisfactorily dilapidated to legitimately tweak into a ratbike. For the uninformed, ratbikes are the old, beaten grime collectors on the roads, owing their character to years of abuse and/or a rattlecan of flat black spray paint. When in genuine form, they have the charm of a old-dog coalminer - harsh, dirty, and constant. Unfortunately for my bike, its transformation to a rat just meant losing a number of its parts, substituting an old license plate for the seat, clutch abuse, and gluing a little plastic monkey to the spraypainted front fender. At this point the owner previous to myself picked it up and reportedly worked a lot on it to make it functional and more comfortable, then trucked it from the midwest to Utah.
Six months later, February of 2007, I found it parked behind Velour Music Gallery looking a bit like this:
(not my photo, props to Pepino in Czech Republic)
but with worse paint, a bunch of wires hanging out all over, a little plastic monkey on the fender, and a cafe seat rigged on the frame. And I loved it. I loved the old twin engine, the short stance, and how I perceived that it looked like a hardass bike. There was no "for sale" sign on the bike, but I asked about for four days to find the owner, Bob, to ask him to sell it to me. Turns out, he was planning on selling it in a couple months to a friend of his. It just happens that this friend is a fellow musician whom I have met and particularly dislike for his crappy music and disgusting pretense. There was no way that I would let that guy have this motorcycle, so I paid the asking price of $750. It was too much but that's the price of pride.
I was able to ride the bike around the neighborhood for a day before it crapped out. After a bit of tweaking and a battery charge, it worked long enough to go on a ride with friends up Spanish Fork Canyon and back...a highly illegal ride as I putted around with no registration, no functioning horn, no rear turn signals. The ride may have been a miracle granted by divine grace, because the next day it died again, prompting me to give it a serious look-over. The right carb had the mixture screw completely bottomed out and cross-threaded, a relay was shorting, and the battery wasn't holding a charge. The clutch plates were galled, giving credence to my complaints of a slipping clutch and neutral was elusive, an apparent feature of all XS650s. I picked up a set of Mikuni VM34 carburetors and full clutch plate/spring set from Mike at 650Central and a new battery from Autozone. This helped the engine run really quite well after getting the carb mixture right and I was off again. For 20 minutes. The battery died, and I was left to contemplate the sad realization of a jacked charging system while I waited for my friend to come pick me up and take me to the Vietnamese restaurant I was intended to meet him at.
During that contemplation and for several days after, I worked myself up to the idea that this would not be a piece by piece project, but a complete rebuild. I thought about keeping the rat look, but somehow...I don't know how to do it. Every time I would fix a part I would make a clean spot and the clean would grow. If i'm taking stuff off the frame and working wiring then why not modify what I can at this point? I decided to take what the little fiberglass seat had already started and make it right with the rest of the bike...a cafe racer.
Once I commited, parts practically fell off the frame and the tools were out, grinding off excess brackets, the center stand, poor welds, passenger pegs, and fixing the uneven removal of the rear frame hoop. Which brings us back to:
How was that for a long exposition? Yeah, I didn't think it would take that long, but this bike, like many, has history, and I tend to get carried away. I wish I had a photo before I tore it down. You'll notice the 3" flat plate welded on the end there marring the wrinkle black powdercoat. While mocking up the template for the seat pan (the profile of which will be based on a nitroheads duckbill seat) I found the cross-brace bumped too much in too many places to allow the pan to sit properly, so I braced the rails up and chopped the offending metal off. The replacement sits flush with the tops of the rails. Unfortunately I had already powdercoated the frame, which was done in a rush to capitalize on a huge oven at a friend's workplace, to which would we would lose access soon. Again, the price of rushing it. I will not again deviate from the time-honored practice of mocking the whole bike up before any finish work begins.
With the frame work finished now, I will need to get it recoated. I worry about the bearing races that I had already installed in the steering head expanding at a different rate than the steel around the head. If anyone has info on this being a problem or on a foolproof way to remove the races without jacking them up, I'd love to know.
This is what it looked like before that removal, with a TX650 tank on:
(as viewed through the lens of my blackberry. It's all I had at the time.)
Recently, I have allotted some time to the electrical mess. This is what I started out with:
And this I what I have worked it into:
How's that for simplification? Fault-prone lighting and safety relays are gone, starter is gone, switching is condensed, and my broken charging system is replaced. This features the Pamco Universal Ignition, switches by Zero Engineering, and a Signal Dynamics Tri-Star module running the front and rear Daytona Mini Indicators (they're the little barrel shaped ones about halfway down the page). All connectors are mini Sure Seals. The ignition switch gets moved underneath the seat and all LEDs are internally resistored. This whole shebang is based on the idea that I will be using a Permanent Magnet setup as has been explained over here. No brushes, fewer components to mess up, and a solid kick-start with or without a charged battery. I plan on using a small RC car or laptop battery for voltage stabilization. My stator is from a Kawasaki Ninja ZX600 and the Regulator/Rectifier is from a '02 Kawasaki ZX6R. This regulator isn't one on the recommended list...the ebay seller listed it as a part from a ZX600, but it was only $14, so I decided to keep it to see if I could make it work. I found this wiring diagram
which uses the Reg/Rec that I bought, and it seems that the only difference is that this one has the extra Yellow wire which runs a headlight relay. Otherwise it looks like it follows the conventions of similar Kawasaki bikes of this type with Black/Yellow as the ground, Brown as the Voltage sense, and White as the power. If there are any persons well-versed in motorcyclin' electo-gadgetry who notice a problem or a better solution for my wiring, please let me know.
Whew. Still reading? Didn't think so, let's keep moving. Another time-consuming endeavor has been modding the top triple-tree:
As I will be running Tarozzi clip-on handlebars, there was no need for the big, ugly holes to sit in my tree unused. So I filled those holes with JB Weld and ground them down pretty smooth.
You can see that the dash bracket bulges are still a little rough. I will finish those up after I have made enough space between them to accept my little 2" speedometer. Dash lights will be on a little aluminium bracket on the side of the speedo.
Further down the fork, I've polished the tubes:
Though not a perfect polish, it will hopefully be a nice base for a scotchbrite finish.
And that's mostly where I'm at right now...I'll hopefully get at the wiring this week and maybe some more engine work will start in a couple of weeks when I get my engine stand built. Tell me what you think!
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