Spent ten and a half hours minus a break for lunch working on things today. I ended up not working on anything last night, I remembered that if I went to work I wouldn't be there alone and I much prefer to be alone. Funny thing happened on the way in this morning too, sitting at a red light guy flagged me down and asked if I'd stop somewhere to talk about the bike. So that's a first for me. Lots of pictures tonight so I'll keep most of them thumbnails as this will already be a big post.
Started out working on the air filters, made some short tubes to get from the silicone tubes to the air filters. Popped them together to see how it looked and be able to measure for the support part of things.
Here is after the support was welded to the tubes, I drilled and tapped two holes in the frame tube right behind the carbs for the support. It doesn't look like much really, but it's actually quite rigid when everything is in there so no worries about the carb adapter to cylinder head sealing this way, and it's a largely unobtrusive way to support everything. That was about the time I went to Hooters with the family for lunch, came back sandblasted that piece and painted it.
Got started then on the rear fender, irritatingly I had to start with a largely unused sheet of steel as we didn't have any scrap pieces laying around large enough to work. Put a roll in the middle of the piece and then broke the edges over. Then it was a couple hours of English wheel, planishing hammer, and the metal shrinker to get it into a fender shape. This is the first time I've ever done a fender, or even anything trying to make a single piece compound curve like this. It was a situation where I felt like I understood the idea behind the creation of a fender and just did that. Looking back now I basically had it right other than not thinking of the metal stretching under the English wheel a bit so I didn't have to start with a piece of as wide as I did, but other than that things went smoothly.
Got the lower end anchored, ended up just reusing the factory fender mounts swapped to opposite sides and it works. I started out thinking I'd modify the factory mounts then realized they are almost certainly cast pieces and won't easily weld in. I could have found a piece of tubing, capped it, and made the same cup design but that just seemed like pointless time when I was expecting a crunch anyway. In the end, I'm good with this way of mounting. The pictures were taken before I did the back mount, for that I welded a tab onto the frame hoop and drilled a hole in the fender. Then put a rubber donut between the fender and tab, securing it was a bolt and nylock nut.
Finished fender, reused the license plate mounting that I had grafted onto the factory fender cutting it off that and rewelding it to this one. Interestingly enough without really even trying to do so the curves of the two fenders matched almost perfectly. Added a couple nutserts to secure the fuse block and machine screws welded to the fender to attach the relays. Also it's not really easy to see but there is a tab welded on to mount the turn signal relay. The other picture shows the bottom edge of the fender with the cut out for chain clearance. At that point did the whole sandblast and paint deal for the fender too. Thankfully it fit into the blast cabinet, much bigger and it wouldn't have fit.
While that was drying, and after I noticed the spot of the air filter adapter that I missed and sprayed some more paint on it, I went through and removed the side cover mounts from the frame. Y'all have convinced me to just run with the filters exposed all the time, though to be honest it didn't take a whole lot of convincing. It just looks cooler that way. Just sprayed some engine enamel over those spots on the frame too for the sake of having something on them. At some point I'd like to take the whole thing down and have the frame powder coated but that's down the road.
Picture showing the layout of everything once I had things installed. You can sort of tell all the open space for airflow here too. I keep checking the alternator controls expecting them to be hot but I'm beginning to think it's just not going to be a problem.
Finished products there, and I just noticed I don't have anything direct on the fender from the side to show it inline with the frame. Even with the crown of the fender, it hides almost completely when viewed directly from the side. Nearly forgot too, I bought the valve adjuster cover from Mikes and got rid of the compression release too.
Riding it home, it seemed to run better on throttle now. The idle is off and will need to be corrected, that surprised me a little as I wasn't expecting the filters to make any real difference in the way the engine ran. Just riding through town it seemed to want to pull better, even pulling out on to the main road on the cold engine the bike just was able to accelerate more smoothly. Thinking about that I got to a safe piece of road and went to wide open through first and second gears and wow, the bike pulls way harder now. I sent a message to a coworker and told him it pulls so much harder I kinda wonder if the old air filters were clogged. I hadn't changed them in the three years I've had the bike but they didn't look abnormally dirty and didn't think it necessary. Now the engine runs clean and pulls all the way to what seems like it should be close to redline. The tach is still broken, and it's obviously hard to gauge RPM at WOT on low gear, but again just seat of the pants the thing is noticeably quicker and sounds happier. So yeah 10/10 would do again on the air filters. Need to clean everything up well and take some nice pictures of it again, but that'll happen enough day. Tomorrow wiring starts, maybe.