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!!