A Cafe Racer Conversion - 1981 BMW R65 (Cape Town): 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: