SoyBoySigh
XS650 Member
Ha-ha. Yeah I can imagine it would seem that way. If say, one were the type of illiterate twat who only flips through internet motorcycle forums for the pictures just like the golf & sports-sedan magazines in the dentist's office, one might well imagine that the people who WRITE the columns & articles therein must surely SPEAK the same way. It would make sense, when the majority of forum users only type "Yup" or "Mmm-hmmm!" for page after page of archived shite - Well enjoy the Boto-Phucket ransom and all that's left of the four-um whoops sorry I mean to say TWIN-um archives, when everything useful was only laid out by way of photographs & image file diagrams etc.
Rather than laid up in my lazy-boy chair thanks to a back surgery that went wrong, another stretch of hours able to move not much but my fingers and having been able to type 100 words per minute five years before hitting the internet, "letting my fingers do the walking" - Bah! NO - Instead, I'm pacing the room feverishly, barking at a voice recognition software program, with a live human assistant taking notes in short-hand & recording my voice just to correct the PC's spelling & grammatical errors - gesticulating wildly and swirling on one heel so as to pace back to the other side of the room.....
So yeah, you've got me pegged. Being that I had $$$'s to burn at the machinist's I figured why not let the taxi sit outside with the meter running while yammering on at the machinist about the bike project's aims and ambitions, the other bikes which had inspired me to bite off a hub rim & tire combination which Buchanan's apparently hadn't seen yet in their three generations worth of business.....
Well, yeah of course at THIS moment I'm dancing a jig & singing my bike-song into this microphone here - But the thing is I didn't have the TIME to speak at any length with the machinist.
Parts were marked with measurements, as in the drums had the "max diameter 200.6mm" scratched out and "Skim To 203.2mm" written in sharpie inside the drum. Steering stem was a blank of steel, a neck with "bearing sizes of this" and another neck "length of this" all bundled together. 4LS drum & 39mm CB900F fork was the complete front end all laid out, with the axle nut in place, I showed him how it fit and brought him a GL1000 axle showing how the nut was on the outside, the speedo side shoe-plate had the speedo guts ripped out and was written on the polished plate outside the drum "be careful here, this is hollow - cut as little as possible!" and the scratched napkin "nut is reversed to avoid removing material from hub" - If that's at all confusing to anybody, we also agreed to speak on the 'phone for further clarification before jumping on anything, fat stack of cash on the barrel-head with the admission that I was in no hurry to get it back what with the six months of snow outside - And yet when he called me a day later it was simply to say he'd finished the whole damn thing.
FINDING: The original steering stem simply cut shorter and threads cut overtop of the OTHER original threads, such that it's nothing but a mess of cross-threaded shit with hairs of steel falling off that he'd tried to pass off as the new threading. And then he'd pressed it into the alloy lower yoke along with the wrong lower bearing back in place! While the shoe plate had even more material removed than if we'd left it the fuck alone - and a huge ass Imperial inch & a half nut in place of the 17mm nut I'd asked for, and an absolute mess of pipe wrench grip teeth chewing up the hex faces! Drums skimmed to the "max 200.6mm" with that measurement still clearly x'd out with black and the bold lurid bright red lettering of the requested dimension still smiling back from inside each of the bells - with PITTING still in place!
I'm glad I didn't ask him to ream out the inter-spoke gap holes to the standard "race mod" lightening size, let alone a "pie crust" style ala Jawa/CZ racing drums! 'Cause he'd probably had drilled out the SMALLER holes and left the 8mm holes for some sort of "MAMMOTH SPOKE" build ala '90s-Y2K+ Harley EVO' powered monstrosities which he's so clearly focused on what with that Terminator II special edition Fat-Boy sitting in the shop.....
-Sigh.
Rather than laid up in my lazy-boy chair thanks to a back surgery that went wrong, another stretch of hours able to move not much but my fingers and having been able to type 100 words per minute five years before hitting the internet, "letting my fingers do the walking" - Bah! NO - Instead, I'm pacing the room feverishly, barking at a voice recognition software program, with a live human assistant taking notes in short-hand & recording my voice just to correct the PC's spelling & grammatical errors - gesticulating wildly and swirling on one heel so as to pace back to the other side of the room.....
So yeah, you've got me pegged. Being that I had $$$'s to burn at the machinist's I figured why not let the taxi sit outside with the meter running while yammering on at the machinist about the bike project's aims and ambitions, the other bikes which had inspired me to bite off a hub rim & tire combination which Buchanan's apparently hadn't seen yet in their three generations worth of business.....
Well, yeah of course at THIS moment I'm dancing a jig & singing my bike-song into this microphone here - But the thing is I didn't have the TIME to speak at any length with the machinist.
Parts were marked with measurements, as in the drums had the "max diameter 200.6mm" scratched out and "Skim To 203.2mm" written in sharpie inside the drum. Steering stem was a blank of steel, a neck with "bearing sizes of this" and another neck "length of this" all bundled together. 4LS drum & 39mm CB900F fork was the complete front end all laid out, with the axle nut in place, I showed him how it fit and brought him a GL1000 axle showing how the nut was on the outside, the speedo side shoe-plate had the speedo guts ripped out and was written on the polished plate outside the drum "be careful here, this is hollow - cut as little as possible!" and the scratched napkin "nut is reversed to avoid removing material from hub" - If that's at all confusing to anybody, we also agreed to speak on the 'phone for further clarification before jumping on anything, fat stack of cash on the barrel-head with the admission that I was in no hurry to get it back what with the six months of snow outside - And yet when he called me a day later it was simply to say he'd finished the whole damn thing.
FINDING: The original steering stem simply cut shorter and threads cut overtop of the OTHER original threads, such that it's nothing but a mess of cross-threaded shit with hairs of steel falling off that he'd tried to pass off as the new threading. And then he'd pressed it into the alloy lower yoke along with the wrong lower bearing back in place! While the shoe plate had even more material removed than if we'd left it the fuck alone - and a huge ass Imperial inch & a half nut in place of the 17mm nut I'd asked for, and an absolute mess of pipe wrench grip teeth chewing up the hex faces! Drums skimmed to the "max 200.6mm" with that measurement still clearly x'd out with black and the bold lurid bright red lettering of the requested dimension still smiling back from inside each of the bells - with PITTING still in place!
I'm glad I didn't ask him to ream out the inter-spoke gap holes to the standard "race mod" lightening size, let alone a "pie crust" style ala Jawa/CZ racing drums! 'Cause he'd probably had drilled out the SMALLER holes and left the 8mm holes for some sort of "MAMMOTH SPOKE" build ala '90s-Y2K+ Harley EVO' powered monstrosities which he's so clearly focused on what with that Terminator II special edition Fat-Boy sitting in the shop.....
-Sigh.
