If its hardened its likely to be only an anneal, and not critical in the hex end anyway. Check with a file.jpmobius said:I imagine that would work fine, presuming it is silver soldered. Keep in mind the job the axle needs to do. While it may seem that it is principally loaded in shear to keep the wheel from falling off, it is also loaded in tension. The clamping force is much more important than may be intuitively obvious. Keeping the swing arm (or fork legs), spacers, inner bearing races, and any other components tightly clamped together makes the assembly a rigid structural component that aids substantially in keeping the arm (or forks) from twisting and deforming under load. So all the mating surfaces need to be nice and square and flat, and at least as large in o.d. as the o.d. of the inner races. The larger the diameter of these parts, the greater the structural benefit. As long as your soldered joint withstands the needed clamping pressure you will be fine - so use a high content of silver. I doubt there is much special about the axle as far as heat treatment, so you should be fine heat wise. Personally I would not hesitate to simply weld it.
Looks like your little relay would be fine. Rather a pain to get the neutral light going though! Any chance you can isolate the indicator so you can power it up inside the tach and use the bikes factory switched ground?
irk miller said:There doesn't have to be any force at all against the hex end.
jpmobius said:With respect, this is simply not so. I believe this particular bike does indeed have a front axle threaded on both ends (I believe we were talking about the rear, but the parts end up functioning the same regardless of the design). It is important to understand that the axle assembly is supposed to function just like a fork brace to both stiffen the whole fork assembly in torsion (bars turn, wheel doesn't) and to keep the two forks telescoping together as a single unit. The larger the diameter of the axle (assembly), the greater the stiffness of the fork.
Indeed, you could leave the axle assembly loose and clamp it into the ends of the fork lowers. The result would be an assembly that would all stay together, but would loose very substantial strength from two sources. First, the slack in the loose threaded connections will allow motion in the assembly. This alone will impact the stiffness of the system, and cause wear in the threads that would never otherwise occur with correct assembly. But let's say there is no motion here. If that is the case, the strength of the element connecting the two legs is just the diameter of the axle itself. The correct procedure is to clamp all the components together with the axle first. This (in the main) makes the functional diameter become much larger and much stiffer, the same as a large diameter tube is much stronger than a smaller tube of the same weight. Then, when you clamp the assembly into the fork legs, you gain this very large improvement - the effective axle diameter becomes the same as the smallest o.d.sleeved component (spacer, inner bearing race, speedo drive, etc.). If the axle nuts are not tight enough, the assembly is much more flexible. The fork lowers have the clamps because there can't be any axial pressure on the fork legs. If there is, the forks will bind. This is not a factor at the swing arm, but the principles are the same otherwise.
irk miller said:The parts do not function the same front and back.
irk miller said:By having the bottom of the forks clamp, that is what is stiffening the front end, not having it threaded in or providing force to the underside of the hex cap. The binding of the forks onto the axle is doing the work. Notice one end of the axle in the pic does not have a hex bolt. If it were important to provide force torquing down on that, it would not be designed that way. Many, many, many axles including my BMW F650 and all modern Suzuki sport bikes are made without a cap at all.
Here is a VZ800 front end. The axle is not capped at all. You thread the axle into the left fork and clamp with the right. There is zero force squeezing the forks together. A shoulder on the axle works against the spacers and the bearings keeping the wheel parts tight together, but the fork is separate from that force.
doc_rot said:This is for the rear. I have a nice stainless axle nut that is made out of 316 I would like to use. I was a little worried about welding dissimilar metals so that's why I was thinking solder as well, but after doing some research I believe using 309L should work fine
1fasgsxr said:I love that green! That's close to the color I was leaning towards on my 1000. Very nice man !!