KZ650 cafe-racer

Being a life long carpenter I know what you are doing and I like the way you think

Yep, wood is a great material.

Individual parts made with a little blood, pain and sweat are the best and last longer.

Mudguard mount may give me headache, as its design slightly complicated. Working it out, though.

Forming metal on a wooden buck is very old school. And very cool! Nice craftsmanship!

gazzz wrote: Thank you, Forrest!

BTW, What is facebook?

I only know that quite a lot of people deserted different forums for it. Though I have never been registered there.

You do great work. I manage the KZMarket page on FB. I run it the same way this site is run. A few of our members are there as well. You would be welcome. It's not as nice and well run as this site and we get more than our share of jerks and spammers. There I can, delete, put offenders on post approval, remove them or block them so they will never see the page again. It will never replace KZR and I don't mean it to. I was asked to be a Admin, I accepted and the Admin switched back to member. I asked our Mod to be a Admin in case I left so he did. Looking for another Mod to replace him. Lots of good deals there but I always come back here to regain my sanity If that's possible. :lol:
Steve

Forming metal on a wooden buck is very old school. And very cool! Nice craftsmanship!

Thanks! Yep. Old methods still work. And sometimes it's fun to "reinvent" them for myself.

You do great work. I manage the KZMarket page on FB. I run it the same way this site is run. A few of our members are there as well. You would be welcome. It's not as nice and well run as this site and we get more than our share of jerks and spammers. There I can, delete, put offenders on post approval, remove them or block them so they will never see the page again. It will never replace KZR and I don't mean it to. I was asked to be a Admin, I accepted and the Admin switched back to member. I asked our Mod to be a Admin in case I left so he did. Looking for another Mod to replace him. Lots of good deals there but I always come back here to regain my sanity If that's possible. :lol:
Steve

Thank you, Steve! Yes, I know the drill. I used to be moderator and then administrator of largest Ukrainian motorcycle forum for years. At the peak of its popularity several hundred people may be found there online simultaneously which automatically means all kinds of jerks and other stuff to manage every new day. I resigned from doing the work only couple of years ago, and anyway, only tenth (even less) part of previous population remained on that forum. I also noticed tendency of depopulation on couple of other forums I am used to visit. That's why I was speaking about facebook. With garage and orders-to-fulfill-so-I-could-run-the-project and my own website; with some delegation and managing; and my IT job and so forth on the one hand; and only one me and only 24 hours a day on the other hand, I just have no time for things like facebook. And thank you for invitation, yet when I have time I’d better post something here:-).

I am constantly amazed by your creativity and craftmanship! As you know, I am just getting my garage prepped for projects.

Thank you all yet one time! Sorry for keeping you without project progress posted. However I didn't score too much of it, as I had some orders to fulfill, not mentioning holidays.

However let’s return to the front mudguard. After I finished hammering it was time for initial cutting, sandpapering , ends’ rounding and side edges’ aligning. To simplify the job I sandpapered outer (face) side of fender, but I left its inner surface untouched, so it still has central line which I scratched on it when mudguard was mere flat sheet of aluminum.



This central line helps to keep fender symmetrical, whenever you round its ends or align side edges. And talking about side edges: the simplest method to grind them on flat surface controlling with calipers and right angle tool.





As result I got two parallel flat side edges. Then I sandpapered fender up to the grit 400 continuously switching from hand work to grinder and back.

According to my design, the mount of the fender is quite complicated. It is to be made of stainless steel and to consist of four parts made on lathe:



Two 6mm rods bent like this:



And also some mount plates. I didn’t order them to be cut on laser, as they would to be bent before drilling and cutting. However, to get two parts of identical dimensions I used old method: after I bent plates, I drilled mount holes, then screwed them together and only after that shaped them and grinded edges.



Photo "how it would look".

I prefer leaving behind the scenes of how I adjusted and welded together all eight parts of fender mount. After parts were welded together I had a lot of grinding work. And sure, some additional decorative welding was done were it was necessary (to make welding seam zones smooth).

Work took a lot of man-hours as it had to be done very accurately. When the finish of grinding and sandpapering became quite visible, mudguard mount already began to look really nice. I smoothed perfectly welding seams on outer sides of mounting plates, however I wasn’t so picky with inner sides: one have to know the edge between perfection and madness…

Final sandpapering took some time, still it’s essential to do the job right if you are about to get mirror finish after polishing. I have nothing to say about polishing itself, I just did it as usual: first polishing to show remained flaws in sandpapering, then correction sandpapering, then again polishing, and so on and so forth until I was satisfied. Result looks great:

Amazing Quality

Great job!