Thursday, February 12, 2015

The frame

The frame doesn't look all that rigid. But it's hardly a problem. Otherwise it's close to the time to start to figure out what to do to the frame. Hardtail - probably not but the tail looks bit weird so something needs to be done. Maybe I'll try to dry fit the engine and gas tank and maybe saddle to help envisioning what it could become.

Wrote the text above the pic couple of days ago and now I'm adding this. The more I spend time staring at the frame and looking bike pics on the internet, the more convinced I become that it has to be turned into a hard tail. I wasn't especially for it for couple of reasons, one small being that have so nice looking vintage pair if suspension to go with it. But there is no denying that it'll probably just look so much better as hard tail. There seems to be no obvious way of having suspension there that would look as nice as I'd like to. But I'll reserve a right to change my mind as many times as I want to; especially if I can come up with an installation that would both work and look awesome. 

Monday, February 9, 2015

My gas tank arrived


The person who sold me the project runs a actual bike repair shop. He said that the bike I bought, originally came with a gas tank, but it had some special painting on it and he therefore took the tank to a display at the shop. Too bad I don't have a picture of it and I haven't seen the original tank myself. But hopefully I can visit the shop and take a pic just to have it. Anyway, I got a new tank. I'm going to skip some details here but I had to make a quick decision on what kind of tank I wanted and just said that I wanted a wide one, because that much I knew. And it feels like a right bet.

Well there it is then. It feels almost too easy to start with a clean, smooth tank like this since I've seen how much some people put effort into actually making a good tank out of something that looks like it was hit by a train. But let's not celebrate quite yet and remember how much experience I have on installing any sort of tank. So I'm sure there will be just enough work for me even if I don't have to fix the tank itself, because, let's face it; currently I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to do or how it's supposed to be sitting on the frame. But that is just temporary - eventually I will know.