More progress on the longest build in history...the motor has met the frame for the first time. I put the engine on its RH side on a piece of carpet and hand lowered the frame over the engine, a few jumps to the left and a step to the right and the bolts went in. Now it's time to bolt stuff already finished on as far as possible and attend to the remaining details over the next few weeks. The body work is ready to paint, I'm waiting for a slot in the Air New Zealand Engineering (where I used to work) paint booth. Should be on the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I've assembled my home made 4 bolt cap forks - CB750 sliders cut off at the bottom and XL350 axle holders machined and spigoted into the 750 sliders. The stanchions are shorter CB550 ones, machined at the bottom end to take the CB750k0-1 lower bush. The upper bush is also used, but the 550 damper rod and top out spring is used, along with YSS emulators. So the forks should work a lot better and are a wee bit shorter so I don't have to run with them raised in the top triple clamp to compensate for the 18" front wheel. I decided to use a CB750 standard oil cap for the tank. Also I've done one disc swap, taking the original disc off the spider and installing a cast iron rotor from Robinson Performance Engineers in Bathurst, Australia. I have one on my CB450 race bike and the improvement in braking with the cast iron disc is incredible. I drilled out the rivets and used some stainless M6 rivets from China off ebay. had to shorten them and then annealed them so they could be formed, as they are as hard as hell, and an aircraft 4X rivet gun wouldn't even touch them. I have one more disc to do but have lost a bag of rivets so wil have to order some more. But you get the gist. The disc spider was bead blasted and painted with HT caliper paint.
