Fender Mount

I cut the fender struts just a little short, so there is a good chance I will have to remake them after a test ride. To make matters worse, my welder went berserk and started splattering all over the place right when I tried to final weld the bungs to the struts, so I will probably do them again anyway, but at least the fender is on the bike.

Fender mock-up

Mounting an aluminum 7 Metal West fender this week. Cobbled a headlight together from a leftover FX headlight bucket and some scrap metal and wired it up with a toggle switch for the high beam.

Mix-N-Match

Let's try a 16-inch front...

New Forks for 60FLH

Swapped a set of 73-77 FLH forks I had in the parts pile on my 60FLH for the FXWG forks it came with. The FXWG forks are either 2 or 4 inches over so these really dropped the front end of the bike, and now it sits a little high in the back. I tried to lower it with a set of 12-inch FX shocks but it was way too low, so the happy medium is somewhere in between those and the stock 13.5 shocks. Need to figure out the front brake too. The 12-inch dual disc lines up with the caliper mount on the left side, so a Banana caliper should work.

Riding it!

Three weeks from bare frame to runner! Still lots to do: hook up the rear brake, lights, rear fender, finish the wiring, paint, etc. Thinking about shortening the springer to improve the stance. It all needs to come back apart to paint the frame, but this is farther than I expected to get this fast. Rides great too, better than my swing arm 60.

Stole the mousetrap release lever off my Pan-shovel to get this one running. Note the 2x4 kickstand stop to keep it from rubbing on the primary belt.

Red Tail Leather seat

Seat mock-up

Roller is getting real close to a runner. The seat is from Red Tail Leather out in SoCal, mounted with Fab Kevin's invisible seat hinge and spring bungs. Chain and rear brake are mounted, just need to attach the stay rod to the frame. Only thing keeping me from riding it today is the clutch release. I was hoping to use Fab Kevin's extended clutch release lever, but it didn't clear the oil tank on the right side, so I need a stock mousetrap arm. Once I get that, the foot clutch lever and linkage are ready to go.

Battery mount

Made a simple battery box by welding piece of angle to the back brace on the oil tank, drilled two holes for threaded rods, and secured the 12V battery with an aluminum hold-down.

It's a runner

The mock-up phase is rolling along with a big milestone achieved today, getting the bike running. Two weeks ago this was a bare frame and the engine was still sitting in the 81 FLT donor, so progress has been quite rapid. I expect to come to a grinding halt shortly! Despite sitting for over a year, the Shovel fired right up on the crappy old gas still in the fuel bowl. This is a far cry from the experience I had trying to get the 60 FLH started. Thank god for advance weights for one thing. The Shovel also kicks over with barely half the effort of the Pan, which tells me something is not stock in that motor. It would seem to have a lot more compression than this stock 80ci Shovel. Anyway, the Shovel fired up on literally the third kick. I left it running for a couple minutes and did a walk around, checking for leaks, flames, or anything else out of the ordinary, which is when I noticed a large puddle of black oil under the bike. It looked to be coming from the crankcase breather, which is odd because the engine never leaked in the FLT. I shut it off and started thinking about what could have caused it and double-checked the oil line routing. I think there was just a buildup of oil sitting in the cases, maybe from kicking the engine over a bunch while I was setting up the trans, and it puked it all out on startup. I fired it up a couple more times and it's stopped doing it, so all would seem to be OK.

I also installed an original H-D police-style hand shifter yesterday. I had planned to run a ratchet top, but I had a real nice tank shift top I found at a swap meet, so rather than change out the stepped shift gate on the police shifter, I'll try the handshift to start. I had to make a rod to connect the lid to the shifter, so I got some 5/16 steel rod and threaded both ends. I had to bend an offset into it to line up the linkage ends, and it still feels like it's binding a little. Might have to tweak that before I get the bike on the road.

I've got a load of parts on the way from Fab Kevin, including the pieces I need to fit the rear axle and space the wheel and rear disc, so it will be a couple weeks before I can have this rolling under its own power. But this weekend's work was a huge step forward.

The Plan

Roll
Run
Stop
Ride
Look Pretty

That's the game plan for the project.

Slapped on some slash cut pipes I had leftover from a basketcase I parted out and got started bolting the trans and primary together.

Fab Kevin Hardtail Shovel Project

This project has been in the works for two years, but substantive progress has only been achieved in the past two hours. The foundation is a Fab Kevin hardtailed 81 Shovel frame with an 80ci Shovel engine from an 81 FLT. I bought the rubberglide FLT a couple years ago with the intent of parting it out and using the engine, but I enjoyed riding the bike so much I put about 5,000 miles on it and put the project on ice. Finally a week ago I found a guy on Craigslist looking for parts for an 82 FLT he had crashed, so we made a deal for my rolling chassis and I pulled the engine. The front end is a late-model H-D Springer, also a CL score. I found the ratchet top 4-speed from a guy on the Horse message board. I spent a couple hours today mocking up the rolling chassis and drivetrain and it's starting to come together. The plan for this bike is a Pan-style bobber using as many gennie H-D parts as possible. What to do about a seat and rear fender are the big hurdles left to figure out, but the rest should go together pretty fast.

New Project: 60FLH H-D Wide Glide clone

The latest project to roll into my shop is this heavily modified 1960 Harley-Davidson FLH, which I scored on the local Craigslist. Gotta love the CL, especially in bike-crazy Milwaukee! Not much of the "FLH" remains other than the crankcases, frame, swingarm, and a few other parts. But it does still have the one thing that really matters, a legit 1960 H-D title. Everything else is just bolt-ons. It's a typical 80s "custom," complete with an air-brushed castle floating in clouds on the rear fender, lots of Taiwan chrome, and a fringe seat and saddlebags. The best part of bringing a bike like this home is the first couple hours of de-customizing it--making it "your own." I have boxes of old chrome junk and doodads from previous project strip-downs like this.

After some basic dechroming, the next thing to do was to try to get it started. The bike hadn't run in about a year, and the wiring was a mess. Amazing how a guy can screw up a bike that only has six wires on it. Pulled the dash and started checking wires, reran a few, replaced some crimp connectors, and sorted that out in a couple hours to confirm it had power to the ignition and spark. Replaced the fuel line to the carb and started kicking. Nothing. Kicked some more. And some more. Checked the spark again. Pulled the plugs a few times. Gas, air, spark---it should run. Kicked some more, then heard a POP. Too bad it wasn't from the engine, it was my right calf muscle. Wow, that hurt for two weeks. Learned to kick with my left leg. Kept on kicking. Finally on day two of ownership, got some coughs and sputters. Kicked some more, and finally after about 500 or so kicks, it fired up into a perfect idle. Then died. Kicked some more, finally got it restarted and hopped on for a run around the block. Ran great and shifted through all the gears. Brakes even worked. Wow, this was a score!

I spent the next couple of weeks sorting out the timing, carb, controls and swapping on new tanks and fender. It was still a bitch to start and it took me a while to figure out what the deal was. Turns out there were a few issues. First, the battery wasn't holding a 12 volt charge, so it wasn't getting a good spark. Checked that and found it was almost completely out of acid. Topped it off, charged it up, and it's like new. The next problem was the timing. I screwed around with that a few times before realizing I should have left it the way I found it. But the big relevation was in the carb. It's got an S&S Super E, which I first cleaned, then took apart and cleaned again and reset all the base adjustments. Finally came to realize it needed a lot more accelerator pump travel to get enough gas for a good prime. Now that I have that sorted out, it starts on the first or second kick every time. No more breaking into a sweat kicking for 10 or 15 minutes in the morning!

The final thing I did was change the bars. The bike had a set of buckhorns on 4-inch risers that were kind of dorky looking and didn't really work with the FXWG front end. At some point they had been crudely converted to internal wiring, even though none of the control wiring was hooked up; must have come from a different bike. Well, the hole cut into the bars under the riser had formed a massive stress riser and one day while I was out riding I noticed a crack in in the riser clamp. Didn't think anything of it until a few days later when I was on another test run and pulled back on the bars and they almost folded back into my lap. Uh, that's a problem. The crack had worked its way almost completely through the handlebar and cracked the clamp in two. I limped it back home and swapped on a set of 14-inch apes I had laying around with some short risers. It looks much better and is really comfortable to ride.

So that's about it for stage one. Not sure where this project is going from here, but I'm starting to get attached to it.