Hey guys, I've been workin on my project for a while now and figure its time to post up some pics on this great site.
The bike is a '75 cb550k that I picked up last year in stock condition except for the 4-1 exhaust. It was a beauty of a bike to begin with, but I've wanted to do a cafe project for a couple years now.
The carbs needed a serious cleaning, so with the help of TT, I got that out of the way early and changed out all the gaskets in the process.
The tubes were gunked hard.
After that I started getting the frame ready for some rearsets. Out came the angle grinder.
Bought some gsxr rearsets off feeBay for about $60 and mounted them with the frame clamps that the ohio cafe racer dudes use. I was worried about them being strong enough but they've been rock solid so far...and I've jumped on'em to test them.
I was originally going to try running a bent rod from the brake pedal back to the drum, but after checking into what some other folks have done, I decided to just connect the pedal with the old shaft.
To do this, I had to make a tab for the linkage rod and get it welded onto the pedal.
The hacked up brake pedal isn't pretty, but it works.
While I was scratching my head about the rearsets, I yanked the stock handlebars off and added some adjustable tommaselli clip-ons. Mounted them above the upper triple tree and lowered the front end about an inch. I took the elbow joint out of the bars to make them look a little cleaner.
I pulled the giant rear fender and cut up some scrap aluminum to make a tail light/license plate mount. It would probably look more at home on a bobber, but I don't really care....as long as it works.
might eventually need to make a new one with some thicker aluminum.
Next on the list was making a seat. thank god for sites like this because I had never worked with fiberglass before. After doing a little research on here and dotheton I started off by making a huge glob of foam with "great stuff" expanding foam.
and then carved out the shape I wanted.
Taped her up:
and went hard with some fiberglass:
The fiberglassing went great, but since I made the wise decision to use some of my pop's 10 year old resin and hardener, it was all for nothing.
Long story short, the resin didn't take and the seat wouldn't harden up. So this one went in the garbage.
After drinking some beer and cursing myself for being too cheap to buy new resin/hardener, I started planning seat #2.
I used what I learned from the first effort and changed some stuff up for the second.
I used a wooden base and some of that green florist foam. It was a helluva lot easier to cut and sand.
After an hour with the old turkey carver, I came up with this mold:
Foiled it up like one of the Hansen brothers and got it ready for glass:
The second go around went alot better, I used higher quality fiberglass matting and new resin. Also used a foam roller that worked like a charm.
The glass hardened up like a rock this time.
here's a couple shots after some trimming:
The seat got a coating of bondo today and should have her ready for paint in a couple days.
