Soon to be a kat 600 fighter

Looks like it is coming along nicely, I helped a friend get most of the way through streetfighter-ing a Kat 600, but he ended up selling it. Tough luck on the swingarm!
 
Yea it was coming along nicely… I switched my focus and started making some modifications to my cb360. I wanted to have at least one bike reliable and ready for this season. Hopefully I can get back to this project in a few weeks. I still have to finish up some wiring and change the clutch on the 360. Then it should be good to go.
 
Check my pics of clutch hub modification, drill some holes to allow oil flow, helps keep plates cooler.
If you've had Katana clutch apart you'll see Suzuki did it stock
 
Frame is stripped and ready to be brought over to my dads shop for all the fab and welding. The blue tape is were the new rear supports will be. I also did some additional shaping on the seat.
63b2508f-5b77-2859.jpg
 
I kinda like the lowered stance, it's a little more like an old UJM. What I've always wanted to do with a modern crotch-rocket, is style it up like a '70s UJM from it's own heritage, without the stripped down cafe racer thing, but rather with the original classic bug antenae stalk signal lights and shit. Those things are cheap enough to source. Then, I'd take the stock fender braces and fit them up with either cut-down or aftermarket fibre-glas old-school style fenders with that new faux chrome crap on them. Maybe take all of the alloy parts and polish 'em up? Especially on the engine bits, side covers and valve covers. Then the body-work side covers could be sculpted out of florist-foam and skinned in fibre-glas, again, in a bulbous old-school style. Then, IF I had a crap load of dough left over, it would be nice to weld up the bottom half of the oem tank to the top half of an old tank off of say, a GS750 or GT750, or even just some chrome side panels on the oem tank, again sculpted out of fibre-glas and faux-chrome and shit. Some old school badges, they make the badges now with custom letters and numbers with the old fonts and stuff, maybe some rubber knee pads on the tank, some bolt-up risers with a super-bike bar or better still a club-man just to get back where the stock clip-ons were, and a nice old master cylinder with the round alloy res on it, old switch pods in polished alloy, mirrors grips etc etc. Maybe go with some fork shrouds or boots if shrouds wouldn't work? The new USD forks only look cool cause they imitate the old covered forks, but they never have matched paint so they don't pull it off. Fork "ears" on a headlight bucket, maybe a plexi-glas wind-shield bolted up to the fork or better still the handlebars. And the ass end of the thing you'd wanna fit a reproduction seat cover, cut down of course, over another chunk of bondo. Main costs would be the second-hand UJM parts and the bondo and the parts sent in for the cheapo fake chrome. Floral foam ain't cheap either. Still, I think it would yield a really cool old school bike. If you REALLY wanted to go overboard, then wire spoked wheels would cap it all off. BUT, being in the middle of a wire wheel swap on my old DOHC cb750f right now, I'd advise people to go with Harley hubs, as they'd save you a butt-load on the spokes and rims. Then you'd only need to make custom adapters for non-harley brake rotors so the wheels wouldn't look like ass. The Harley hubs themselves are nice and small, it's just the honkin' big spacers they use so they can make cheap-assed flat plate brake rotors in a zillion different head-bangin' styles on a water jet cutter. Still, many of these hubs are five bolt or even six bolt, so I am sure that manyfloating rotors could be bolted up. The inch-spec bearings could be sourced for nice metric axles, and even up to a good thick axle too, 'cause they're a good fat axle anyway. Just trust me, even with all of the crap you'd have to deal with, Harley hubs would be the most simple way to go about it. Even if you needed to bolt on a cush drive cut down from another type of hub, due to the Harley hubs not having cush drives on them.... Okay, maybe at that point you'd wanna spend a little more and use a UJM hub of some type, but you'd be looking at easily another couple or three hundred PER WHEEL to go with a custom wheel with UJM hub. Pre-fab Harley wheels can be sourced with tube-less sealing on them, though only in limited sizes of rims. Still, it would work out. If you ask ME, you wanna go with the 18" rims anyway, just to get the '70s look on wheels like that. But hey, you really don't need to go that far with the thing anyway. It would be uber-cool in the first place, just to get the bodywork lookin' old-school in the first place. There are just so many so-called customs nowadays, where all people are doing is cutting shit off and capping off the holes they leave in the process. It's far more involved to ADD shit to the bike, without making it butt-fugly. But look at the new duc GT1000 touring bike, so many of us have stared longingly at those adverts, haven't we? THAT bike has shit on it which you could throw at ANY modern bike and it would come off amazing looking. But take it a step further, and style the bike to look like it's distant ancestor, and it's a winner. I figure all of the crap I'm trying to do with my DOHC supersport could work out on a fireblade or blackbird, with the exception of the tubular frame and the air-cooled motor. Still, that doesn't really matter, when you consider how many cool old bikes have water cooling, two strokes, pressed steel frames, perimeter frames, etc etc etc. It's all just a question of styling, really. When I first saw what were later called street fighters, back in the early '90s, they reminded me of race bikes from the UJM super-bike era. And if you feel, as I do, that street fighters have really lost touch with their roots, and become an icon of total Chachi fuckin' gold-chains and dripping permed out hair with designer running shoes fucking Vanilla Ice closet-case bling-bling, then you might wanna think a little longer before you just cut down the sub-frame so the tail end of your bike sticks up like the tail of a scorpion. Yeah? Right. Just MY two bits.

Oh, and as for the frame damage in the swinger zone, I'd have the car-fax checked on that bike, to see if it's been in a fender-bender. Maybe the missing bits disppeared from in there AFTER the bike was bent!

-S.
 
Thanks JRK!

Made some progress on the fab work. Capped off the hollow tube for the footrest, fixed my sloppy kickstand, and fabbed the headlight bracket. I am really liking the look of the hella 700ff.
eb6b1078.jpg

17de1300.jpg

796f0540.jpg
 
That hella light looks serious! Have you been able to test the beam pattern at night or anything? I'm just starting a 1988 CBR600 build for the wifey and any input on that would be appreciated! Loving this so far!
 
Bruno - I haven't tested the distance yet, but the light is pretty bright it uses a standard h3 55w bulb. Its going to be a while before it is all wired up.
 
You could always hook it up to a battery...heh ;)

Just messing with ya. This thing is going to be killer. I just picked up some more metal for the rear end of mine after I cut it up...got any pics of the frame after you changed the stance, or haven't gotten to that yet?
 
This project is moving very slow, but I am still making progress. I am trying to do as much as I can without spending any money. Layoffs are coming around where I work and everyone is super panicked. Luckily my pops has a lot of scrap steel that I have been fabing all my parts from. I will post some pics over the weekend of the frame/ seat supports that I made up.
 
I finally decided that bolting my seat on was going to be the easiest option. I was toying around with the idea of latches but couldn’t come up with any good designs. So I made two cross supports from square tubing to keep the frame square and use as the bolting points for the seat. I ended up using a 1” end mill in the Bridgeport to notch the tubes with an offset so the tops sit flush with the top of the frame tubes. I also welded in some spacers through the square tubing to give the bolting point some strength. I had to drill the holes at a 12° angle to match the angle of the frame tubes.
c6e4c995-4311-3231.jpg


The seat bolts in with two M8 bolts at the front and one M6 at the rear. I used some weld in metric nuts that worked really well, much better than trying to weld a regular hex nut.
c6e4c995-435f-5e5b.jpg
c6e4c995-436b-8ed2.jpg

Next I have to work on the supports to hold up the tail section and figure out what type of bolt on pass pegs I want to use. I want to weld bungs into the tubes so I can use pass pegs mounts from a gsxr or similar and remove them when I do not need them.
 
Keep it up man, this is going to be killer. I get to ride my cbr tomorrow if all goes well...(bearings to install etc) Can't wait to see how yours turns out! 8)
 
Thanks Bruno
I really dig the tail section you did on your cbr. How do you like the Koso gauges? Is it worth the extra cash over the trailtech speedos?
 
I can't truly have an opinion on that, since I have never actually had a trailtech speedo. What I can say, is that it's a great looking gauge, it's made for newer sportbikes (newer as in... 1990's + really) and came with tons of hookups and brackets. It has 2 new temp sensors that you can unscrew the old and put these in for water and oil I believe...(haven't done that yet though). I only paid $200 as it was a CL find...so I didn't feel like I was getting hosed. Look around for a good deal, I'm pretty happy with it, and see this thread for the other version of the RX2 gauge. He seems happy with his purchase as well.

http://www.dotheton.com/forum/index.php?topic=36761.80;topicseen

Oh, and thanks for the compliment on mine! ;D
 
Thanks AJ!

This build has been really slow... Layoffs at work, four weddings this summer, and working on peoples bikes for cash, have been keeping me busy for the past few months. O yea and fixing my Honda when something breaks which now happens about once a month.

I did recently purchase a set of 06-07 GSXR passenger pegs that I am going to use on this bike. I am planning on getting back into building next week. Rear tail supports are next to fab up. They will include the mounting points for the removable pass pegs. Then onto the support for my 03-05 R6 integrated tail light and the skeleton for the tracker style rear fender.
 
Back
Top Bottom