Sunday, April 8, 2012

Front fork mockup.

I've got all the miscellaneous bits cleaned up and painted, so I'm going to start putting together a motorcycle.
One item that I've spent a lot of time on is the front forks. I'm very close to having the Suzuki GT750 forks adapted to work with the Enfield frame. The main part of that was threading the top ends of the stanchion tubes to screw into the Enfield cast aluminum upper fork crown.
That's done. I'm in the process of modifying the end plugs to work with this setup, and I decided to go ahead and assemble the forks so I could make sure the wheel and brake disks are going to work.
Here's a photo of the loosely assembled forks. I'm still waiting on the little upper cover tubes which conceal the bottom triple clamp, and provide something to clamp the tops of the fork gaiters to.


I'm managing to get a little work done every day. It's looking like I can manage to get this bike done by May 20th if I concentrate on it. Consequently, I've given up my goal of restoring both bikes by the target date. If I keep working on both, I'll end up with two incomplete bikes to take to our  show.  I'll see if I can change the title of the blog to "Restoring Two Enfields in Two Years".
I can probably pull that off now that I've got some momentum built up.
Stay tuned, this should start coming together pretty fast now.
4/9/2012 update:
Finally got a solution  to a problem that anyone who tries to restore a Royal Enfield  in a home shop will encounter; how to put the frame on a cheap motorcycle stand in a postioin that allows you to work on both ends of the bike, while being solidly supported at the same time.

I was getting tired of the frame wiggling around with that strap holding it to the stand, and now, in addition to being solidly supported by those angle iron brackets, I can begin setting up the rear suspension and attach the wheels once they're ready.