Z650 - from standard to...?

With the cardboard mock-up of the oil tank knew that it'd fit okay at the front of the swinging arm, so set to to make the bits to make the tank, albeit with a tweak to the design to make it taper downwards.
Firstly marking out the sheet of alloy.

Bender!

This shape appeared -

Years (and years) ago I'd started making a breather tank from an old aluminium gas bottle that my mate had found at a scrapyard. I'd cut a slice off it and had it welded up, so that it'd fit under the tail unit.

The problem was, I hadn't considered tyre clearance on the underside...

So I did some chopping and cut a section out.

Then made some pieces to fill it in.

Love the location and nice work, coming along really well

Brett

I'd bought a filler cap and tube of the interwebs, and made up a pair of brackets to use for rubber-mounted hangers for the oil tank, and took all the bits over to my good friend at Fast By Me turbos to glue them together, like so...

Another little job that I'd be procrastinating over (what, me? Surely not...) was getting the mounts sorted for the horn.

The horn (bought from a canal boat chandlers) had one mounting point already on the original electrics plate, but needed to lower mount adding. So I cut out a piece of steel sheet to fill in the gap on the plate -

And then a passing pigeon pooped on it to hold it into place...

The object at the bottom of the pic of the bracket I made up to hold the electric oil pump - a piece of stainless tube welded to a plate with a couple of supporting pieces. I was a tad happier with the welds on this bracket than those for the horn piece...

Nice work mate, liking this build!

While I had the MIG out, I made up a pair of brackets for the oil tank to weld onto the frame cross member where the centre stand was once mounted, and tacked them in place. they can be properly welded up when the whole thing is stripped down.

With the bracket made for the oil pump, I planned for it to be rubber mounted to a matching bracket on the frame, so I cut out some sheet steel and blobbed it together. It ain't pretty in this pic, before it was tidied up.

Knowing roughly where I wanted it (on the removable cross-member come rear engine mount), I unbolted it and wiggled it out (a tad awkward with the engine still in place), cleaned the powder-coat off and welded the bracket into place. Fully. Not tack welds.

Guess what? Yep, it's in the wrong place. It needs to be further over to the left to give room for the feed and return lines.
So, back out it comes, cut it off with a slit saw, clean it all up again and re-weld, this time only tacking it in place to make sure it was right. Lesson learned. The oil line can now run up from the oil tank at the right hand side to the pump, then from pump to turbo and then the big oil return hose can go back to the tank at the back of the engine, towards the chain side.

Ages ago I mentioned the issues with the rear brake, in that the disc is quite small, and I was struggling to find a caliper hanger that I could use / butcher to suit.
After being pointed in the direction of an RG500 hanger, I bought one and, lo and behold, it has the right dimensions for the cast iron disc on the Dymag wheel, although the RG spindle was somewhat smaller than the 25mm spindle in my Martek swinging arm. Fortunately, the RG hanger has (or rather, had) a steel bushing that could be drifted out.

As I'm using a Bandit rear caliper, with the built-in torque arm mount, I didn't need the mount on the caliper hanger, so that was lopped off.
After waving the measuring stick around the back end, I had some measurements and asked a mate (thanks Sam!) to make up a new bushing, beautifully made in stainless steel and pressed into place (once the bush had spent a night in the freezer and the hanger a morning in the oven)

And that was all fine and dandy, hanger fitted to the bike and caliper bolted into place. Except that when the caliper bolts were nipped up...

Yep, the upper edge of the caliper is fouling on the hub of the Dymag. Buggeration.
You can see on this pic that I'd already ground off a bit of the caliper to try and get clearance, but more is required...
So I ground some more off, perhaps getting a bit gung ho in the process...

That's the piston seal peeping out. On the plus side, there seems to be plenty of clearance to the hub, so I had taken too much meat off the caliper. I've another Bandit caliper on its way, so I can try again, this time being a bit more delicate with the grinder.

Been a while since i checked in on this thread good to see more progress any more updates ?

I've not posted for a while as I lost a load of pics when I dropped my phone in my pond (look, I was trying to take a pic of some frogs, okay?)... but yes, some progress has been made - battery box fettled a touch, oil and fuel pumps fitted, rear caliper messed about with and some other stuff. Bodywork has now gone for paint, more pics soon!