Well with Christmas and New Years behind us, it was time to get back to work. Mike came out to pitch in Wednesday night and we spent a few hours banging our heads against the wall trying to get some form of progress underway. To start with, the chainguard he had painted up all nice and pretty just didn't fit the machine at all, so over the holidays I had found the time to bang out the wrinkles from an ugly old one he had found that actually seemed to fit. We got that bolted into place and the missing bracket I had to fabricate for the rear fender struts was bolted on as well...let me tell you, that fender ain't going nowhere! We seemed to be making pretty good progress bolting on the oil tank, when we noticed that the oil line fittings were hard against the frame...it was removed again for further head-scratching and will be dealt with again soon. A suitable clutch rod was found and the clutch is all together now awaiting screws to hold the primary cover in place. Meanwhile I wanted to get the rear wheel fitted...this turned out to be a royal pain in the arse. So far the engine and most of the bike has gone together with relative ease, but the rear wheel is a bit of a hodge-podge...this is something I often run into when assembling a pile of bits and pieces that are supposed to represent a whole motorcycle. We had accumulated most of what we needed, but the parts may be from God-knows-what model and year. I enjoy a challenge and since I was missing the axle and QD stub shaft, I decided I would fabricate the parts myself rather than be held up for weeks trying to locate parts. I started off with the stub shaft, carefully measuring and fitting as I went until I was able to mount the brake and hub to the left side of the swing arm. That's when I noticed that the brake hub was having serious interference issues with the chain guard. Not wanting to cut up my nice finished sheet metal work, I thought I would just trim away the fins on the hub...nobody's gonna see that anyway, right? So I chucked it up in the lathe and carefully cut the fins down to the outside diameter of the brake hub, temporarily fitted it to check the clearance, then sprayed a bit of fresh paint on it and set it aside to dry. With that looked after, I turned my attention to making the axle...on this particular model, the axle goes right through the stub shaft and anchors the brake spring clip outboard of the stub shaft nut. All I had to go by for this job were memory and the drawings in the parts manual, so once again carefully and measuring and fitting as I went, I managed to make up a pretty decent axle on the first try. After loosely fitting the wheel, I measured the gap for the axle/wheel spacer machined one of those and with all the little bits and pieces finally done I tightened everything firmly in place...holding my breath, I gave the wheel a push and it spun freely. Total time to just get this rear wheel sorted out came to about five hours...worth it?...I don't know, but the sense of satisfaction when something like this comes together can't be bought.