Softail swingarm

At the same trip to get the spoke wrench I swung by a person who was selling an used swing. I'm doing a hardtail so I don't really need the whole softail swingarm, but it's a way to get the axle plates.

This is the swing it self

and the axle plates are these parts of it. 

This is pretty much the cheapest and most convenient way to get the axle plates. One option is to just make a custom plate out of piece of steel which ensures the freedom to go after certain looks. But it's pretty much work and needs some real tools. The other option is to order custom stuff, which is the most expensive approach. And the third option would be to buy the plates just as is, but buying them new costs more than whole used swing. 

The idea of the part is that the rear wheel axle goes through there and the axel plates connect the frame tubes here. If you are wondering what is the whole point of the swing it would be originally the tail part of the frame, little like this. But you can also see from the picture what else needs to be done. The upper part of the frame should form pretty much a straight line from steering axle to the rear axle, which I very skill fully illustrated there with Gimp. 

Spoking around

Today I went to a hardware store and purchased a spoke wrench. See on the pics how blue and pretty, it is. Like a candy. Not that the job would necessarily require a special tool, but I didn't have small enough wrench in any case and this thingy didn't cost much. I applied little bit of wd40 and I got almost all spokes out easily even if I was afraid that they would have been stuck with rust. I left myself also a small hint with a marker so that when I start putting new spokes back on I have some clue as of which goes where.

Nice and easy, but given the number of spokes, unscrewing all of them took about two hours including one coffee and doughnut break. I got the doughnuts from the gas station next door. It's a sympathetic sort of place and open 24/7.

Did you notice that I said almost all? One of the four balancing nuts, or what ever they are called, was damn stuck. I applied again brute force - which I apparently don't posses in sufficient measures. So I had to figure out something else, which in this case meant more wd40 and applying heat. We have torches but a cigaret lighter did the job this time and off it came. 

And before the long the end result was neatly separated hub and rim. It looks like that side had been in the bottom of an ocean for a decade but now it'll be easy to sand off. And it's not going to be visible but I'm afraid getting the new tyre on will be pain in the butt if the surface is so coarse. Taking the old tyre off also left it's mark on the rim but I'm sure I can use rubber hammer and bang the kinks off. You can see one malformation right on the part touching the floor. Speaking of which, the floor looks icky. We clean the garage quite often but years of being commercial building has left it marks. Plus it's a garage.

Feeling the wheels

So, I got the new white wall tyres. I went for 150mm rear tyre because it fits the original rim. According to more knowledgeable sources the shovel head bikes were manufactured and shipped with the same rim holding tyres form 130mm to 150mm.

While the front wheel looks good, the rear wheel spokes are rusty and it makes sense to change them. And since I'm such a fancy pants I went for stainless steel instead of chromium plated. See the pic, fancy.

Pretty hands are not mine. And totally unrelated, but I can't use expression "chromium plated" without thinking Judas Priest song Painkiller, you know "Chromium plated boiling metal / brighter than a thousand suns".

Aaaanyway, the point of the story for today is that taking the old tyre off was more work than anticipated. The rubber had lost most of its elasticity and in all possible ways it was totally cemented in it's place.

We started by trying to use a press to get the tyre to loosen from it's place and to slide to the valley in the rim's profile ( I really am missing terms here - and I'm not in the pic).

It took while for us to get this working. The piston head itself had too small a surface area but after taking the pic we added a piece of square tube there and it helped. But at some point, we did try other means of brute force. Like this,

and this

before we ended up actually sawing open the damn thing.

Did it take more time than driving to nearest wheel shop and get it done there? Hells yeah it did. And to add to that, one of the dudes in the pics has tyre machine at his work. So there would have been proper machinery available, yet it somehow made more sense to do things the hard way.

But it's gone and all that is left is big damn layer of rust. Next step is getting the old spokes out and trying to sand the rust off.

Checking the engine

Alrighty then, slow movement can be seen here. There is a story about how difficult it was to get the rear wheel tyre of the rim but that's a story for another day.

Now I'm just announcing that I'm taking the engine to a pro who will measure it and then we will know what needs to be done. Wish me luck it's not fubar.

Meant to take a pic from the trip but completely forgot it. I also am missing quite a bunch of things like anything that should be inside the oil pump. Seems that I mostly have just the casing, and I'm missing camshaft and pushrod but otherwise it's looking good - meaning there is enough wall to bore the cylinders. For visual purposes, let's recycle some old pic, here you go

  

What about the offset?

Started to read a book called Motorcycle Dynamics, which dives into the physics of handling bike in quite a details. That brings me back to the Geometry -post where I mentioned the steering axle and fork main offset. Offset can be used to adjust the trail, but it has some other implications as well.

One thing offset does is that it reduces the up and down motion of the front when turning the handlebar. Since the steering is not in upright position the center of the front wheel lowers. The plot is an example of calculations with 32 degree caster angle (angle of steering axel from vertical line) and 32 cm wheel radius.

Calculations  assume still some silly stuff like dimensionless wheels and hence no roll at all. Plus I'm severely hangoverish from yesterdays party at the garage so I'm not promising anything of this is 100% correct

So what? Good question, I've no clue about what all that means. But at least pumping front up and down is not nice for handling since it makes it heavy. If there is 150kg of weight on front wheel you will be pulling that up and lowering down in every turn.

Random pics maybe related to something but probably not

Harry potterism of building bikes

There is something funny and fascinating about the whole culture of craftmanship around building bikes. First of all, there is no internet here. If I need to find someone to measure and bore the engine I will not find that person by googling it. They way these masters are found is by knowing someone, who knows someone who knows a person with a beard like Dumbledore and a skill of resurrecting engines that are know to be dead for decades.

These dumbledores can be found in addresses like seven and half of a street that probably is not on a map. After finding the building there will be about dozen iron doors with no signs of what so ever, so one needs to be good at guessing, have a guide or go knocking on all the doors until the right one is found. When the right one is found there will be someone speaking in dialect barely understandable to anyone who was not born on a bike - and he will be asking who sent you. If you answer that question right you may be granted access to dungeon of parts, tobacco smoke, machinery and bikes that are so hand made and customised I'm willing to believe they are constructed atom by atom.

So cool.

Pic not related but the whole blog looks so damn boring if there are no pics in the posts. This is from Norrtälje show in May 2015. Or was it June.