OK, so as promised, here's some pictures of the last few weeks of what I've been doing with the front end. Work has been slow, seeing as how the only time I can get any machining done is during lunch when I don't have anything else going on.
This was after I roughed the stem out and pressed it into the lower triple... It was at this point that I figured out that the hole for the stem was not bored in line with the upper triple tree, and I figured out how Yamaha put their front ends together. The original stem was not machined "in round", so what they do is bore the lower triple for the stem, press and weld the stem into it, then they cut the stem afterwards and bore the clamps at the same time with a machine that is obviously extremely expensive.
So to compensate for this, I undercut the bottom 1" of the new stem so that it just slips in/out of the lower stem. What I'll do is bolt everything on the forks and clamp them onto our welding table at work on some V-blocks to ensure it's dead straight and parallel. Then I'll clamp the triples to the forks with the stem screwed into the top and through the lower, then weld the bottom of the stem to the bottom of the lower triple. No sense to skimp on prep to make sure it's absolutely dead nuts straight.
This is more of a PSA about the importance of eye protection. I was cutting a piece of steel in our lathe, spinning it about 900RPM and it had quite the pile of stringy material building up on top of the tool. Usually, I run it so it chips off and doesn't come off in strings, but it was a finish cut so I was cutting slow on high speed. As it got closer to the chuck, I guess one of the jaws got a hold of part of it and it launched it right at my face (I normally don't stand right in front of the chuck, but bad timing caught me). Luckily, we always wear safety glasses, and I was wearing mine. The mass of stringed steel wasn't heavy, but launching at 900 RPM had plenty of momentum, and sharp edges. I got lucky. It bled for about an hour like this, but none of the cuts were very deep and it healed up in a couple days. My glasses had a fairly deep scratch right where my upper eyelid would have been on my left eye. I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me take a step back for a minute. So be careful out there, always, always, always wear eye protection, you may have 2, but it only takes a second to lose them both.. It also only takes a second to put on a pair of safety glasses.