Deathcats ride-out

Me and big chief (my dad) rode over to leeds and met up with TC. He is at a similar place to me with his XS - its on the road but still working out the teething problems!

Anyways it was great to finally ride them out together, after endlessly talking over these bikes for about the last two years! (a little longer in TC's case ;p)

Its amazing how different these bikes are considering that the frames and engines are pretty much identical! We have both crafted them into out own style though, and I for one think that they look like a pair of badass scoots!!

Number plate mount

Been working on the number plate mount this last week. The previous one was just fastened on to the end of the rear axle, and while I liked the position, I decided that I wanted two fixing points to toughen it up! I looked at making two tapped connections in the axle plate or the ends of the frame pipework, but I wanted to keep the plate in roughly the same position as before, so I opted to with the rear axle mount again, but also add a fixing point on the sissy bar.



So I made a bung on the lathe and welded it on. Next I mocked up the rough shape of the bracket with some cardboard (obviously!! ;)), careful to avoid the sissy bar mounting point, while allowing enough room to get to the axle nut and chain adjuster..



Last time I used 3mm, this time I used 5mm plate.



Obviously this is not the final shape, but I kept tweaking it and chopping bits off as I went. Similar to last time I cut the piece to fix the number plate on to out of 3mm steel and welded in a gusset to strengthen it up.



So to add strength and hopefully stop the thing wagging like a puppy's tail, I 'boxed' the number plate mount out a bit with some more 3mm sheet;





Obviously speed holes are a must!! Drilled the holes for mounting the plate and lights and tried it on the bike...







Its probably a little OTT, but I have no intention of walking down the side of the road trying to find it in a hedge!!

Sold out!

Unfortunately we have sold out of the tab sets!

More coming soon though with new improved designs... watch this space!

Bigger, badder, better!

Right so after the mad rush of getting the bike ready for the Hayride, I have been fairly relaxed about sorting out the number plate mount and fender supports, so this represents work done over the last few weeks:

One of the things I didnt like was that the bolts to secure the top of the fender struts ended up precariously close to the tyre..



So I made some threaded lugs and welded them onto the outside of the fender mounting points to negate the need of a nut on the inside;





This gives me a nice solid mounting point! Previously I had made two separate fender supports, one on each side, but this meant that the fender shook like Elvis at certain rpm and so flexed the fixing points untill the welds broke. So this time I decided to make one solid bar that supported the whole lot.

I bought some 12mm steel bar to do the job, heated it up with a propane torch and recruited my dad to help bend it round this post thumper which was roughly the right size.







Ta-da! It took alot of warming up and didnt work perfectly first time so there was plenty of re-heating and tweaking it in certain areas. Really would have been better with oxy-acetylene, but just used what we had to hand, deffo couldnt bend anything thicker than 12mm though.

To mount the bar onto the axle plates I wanted to avoid the same issues as before where all the flex was going through one little horizontal weld. So I made these sort of heavy duty 'boots' out of 10mm plate which meant that I could weld them along the length of the bar, rather than across the flat end.

Cut the plates out of 10mm steel;



Drilled 12mm dia. hole into the end;



Slotted onto the end of the bar;



Straight away you can see that this isnt going to be easy to break! I followed the same theory with the fender fixing points and made some little brackets, again out of 10mm plate.



Finally I cut the bar to length, tacked it all in place on the bike, and then welded it all up.









It looks a million times tougher than the pissy little things I had on before. Now I think the weak point is most likely the mounting points on the fender, just above where I have welded the threaded bungs onto. But now it doesnt have the ability to flex as much this hopefully wont be a problem.

Next to mount the number plate!!