Thanks Per, I’m tempted to try it, but am a bit worried about removing enough material to help ease the rings in, with the sleeves taken out to 64mm, I suppose a small taper wouldn’t hurt though. The other issue is that the cylinder block came from a bike that had fatter conrods, so the bottom of the sleeves were cut about an inch on either side to allow for them, but I suppose that wouldn’t make much difference.
Awhile ago Spotty gave me a couple of pink fibre 4” strip discs for my angle grinder. I’d removed most of the paint with paint stripper last week but there was still some old primer and filler to remove before I can paint the frame, so I tried his discs, and they’re amazing, they ripped the paint off, and smoothed the metal very quickly. I didn’t manage to strip it all yesterday but will finish it today and hopefully have the frame in primer by tonight, and painted by the weekend.
The chopper didn’t have an electrics box like most choppers, instead the builder welded some thin steel panels to the frame around the seat area to hide everything, then slathered bondo over them to clean up the crappy metal work. I don’t like it, and I think I’ll cut it all out and fab up an electrics box like the Cafe Racers use. It will make more work for me, but I think it’ll be worth it, as the electrics were a mess. He also used a stock oil tank mounted sideways under the frame, which I’d like to replace with something prettier, and easier to access than removing the seat to check the oil, which I’m guessing he didn’t do very often considering how filthy the oil that came out of the engine was.
I’ve had a look at custom oil tanks on EBay but most are for Harley’s and don’t have much capacity, trying to find one that holds 3 to 4 litres has proved fruitless so far. I may have to use the stock oil tank temporarily until I can find something better. Regardless, it’s moving along, and I’m looking forward to bolting it back together. Hopefully the little BMX shock absorbers will arrive this week so I can make up some brackets for them before I paint the frame. I used my Nutsert kit to install a 10mm nutsert in the top frame rail to mount the seat hinge yesterday and used a better stainless steel bolt and some washers to shim up the slop in the hinge, it originally came with a crappy full thread bolt and a plain nut that was really sloppy, so I found a bolt with a plain shank for the full length of the hange, that won’t chew out the hinge as I bounce up and down the road.
