22 February 2015 - The Return of the Engine (Cape Town Cafe Racer)

My best mate, Shea, fell off a balcony last Sunday and spent the week in ICU. It was touch and go for a while and scary as hell, so it's been a pretty shit week. He's been discharged now, though, and is under house arrest at his folks which is awesome. The bike has been a great distraction.

Oscar wasn't overreacting about the engine, it looks pretty epic:

Engine after vapour blasting. Note the newly serviced inside-out carbs.

The engine cover also arrived this week - it will be sprayed to match the engine. As you can see the old air filter box has been removed and replaced with cone filters. We opened up and cleaned the transmission which was a bit dirty and rusted. The little air filter coming out of the side of the cover is connected to a breather hole that went into the old air filter. Next step engine-wise is to take off and service the heads. We've also got some peanut covers to put on there. Oh yes - and the search for the missing washer continues! Unfortunately it wasn't sitting in the timing chain/sprocket chamber which means it's probably fallen into the sump which means we'll have to remove that as well.

Freddie popped by and helped Oz dismantle the transmission

Clutch looking a helluva lot better after cleaning

I spent 3 hours unsuccessfully trying to hand drill a hole into the disk-brake to counter sink the new Acewell speedo magnet into. That was a bit of a kak jol. In the end we took it to some engineers to get it done properly. 

I did have quite a lot of fun making the bracket for the speedo sensor though. We've got a bit of a holey theme going which I carried through to the bracket. It was frustrating spending so much time making something so small, but in the end it was worth it. 

 

It's attention to detail that's going to set this bike apart from the rest!
Speaking of which, the paint on that disk is going to need some touching up

The wiring is all done! Besides crimping a couple of wires I had nothing to do with this! The wiring diagram looks like something John Nash came up with and the harness looked like something out of Alien Vs Predator to me. I was disappointed to not have been more involved in the wiring but at least it was something to keep Oscar busy while I was away. Without it he might have been tempted to finish the bike without me!

The cockpit is looking very sleek/minimalist with most of the wiring having been jammed into the headlight and the switches replaced with micro switches which are almost done. 

We made some more holey plates to replace the reflectors on the front fork which were a bit of an eyesore. New Ultrabatt lithium batteries have been ordered. 

Oscar wants to take the bike to Killarney race track as soon as she's done to see who can record the fastest lap. I said that sounds like a terrible idea.

Sneaky look at the bike so far

Please drop us a line if you have any questions, comments, advice, or just to say howzit!

Cape Town Cafe Racer Conversion. 

11 February 2015 - Planet Zastron Round 2 (Cape Town Cafe Racer)

The fact that my last two updates have both been done from Zastron is probably not a coincidence. With work being so hectic I feel as though I've barely got time to work on the bike, never mind update this blog. It's hard to do much bike work from a distance of 1000 km, though, so I guess this is the next best.

Two weeks have passed since the last update and although it feels like we hit a serious go slow recently a lot has actually happened when I think about it. It's just been mostly stuff that doesn't translate into any serious visual progress to the untrained eye (my eye).

Last week while Oscar was busy chopping and welding the subframe and marvelling over his new auto-darkening welding mask I was tasked with plugging up the engine so that we could take it to Bernard to be vapour blasted. In the process I managed to drop a washer into the engine. Needless to say this was a huge fucking bummer. It means that we're now going to have to dismantle the engine a little bit more than we were hoping to but at least we'll get to take a look at the timing chain and sprocket while we're at it.

Prepping the engine for vapour blasting involved a lot of ad-libbing

Oscar has finished chopping and reinforcing the sub-frame and the seat is now mounted.

Oscar working on the sub-frame

Oscar's also busy working on some really sexy micro switches for indicators, horn, engine start/stop etc. 

The start of the micro switch

We've also started tweaking some of the minor details as we go. For example we weren't happy with the bar-end mirrors we bought, so we replaced them with classic chrome mirrors, which we then replaced with beautiful black bar-end mirrors Oscar found. Sounds a bit pedantic, but every detail counts!

The tank has been stripped and we've pretty much decided on colours (98% sure). We don't like the lines of the original tank so we're filling it and like I said in previous post we're also going to adjust the angle of the tank ever so slightly which makes a big difference to the overall aesthetic.

Filling the belly of the tank to improve the lines

I saw a couple of pretty cool BMW conversions at a shop called Platinum Motorcycles the other day. I must have walked passed the shop 100 times during my lunch break, but I never went in. Here are some pics of their bikes:

Just got a message from Oscar that the engine is ready to be collected. Message reads "Fucking, fucking, fucking hell.". Can't wait to see it!

Time to give the workshop a once-over

Please drop us a line if you have any questions, comments, advice, or just to say howzit!

Cape Town Cafe Racer Conversion.