'53 Triumph 5T... after 40+ years of sitting?

Chris

New Member
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Hi I am Chris, I'm 27. This is my first bike and I have no motorcycle experience whatsoever. Everything I do here is a learning experience. I have been working on the bike for a few months so here are a lot of photos to get you caught up.. I will try to go chronologically.

Dug it out of the garage after sitting forever to take some before shots... put air in the tires and the rear brake even worked. It has the rear sprung hub as well. That's me proud as a mother fucker.
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End of day 1... all done with hand tools (didn't have any Whitworth yet so it was a lot of back and forth between SAE/Metic)
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End of day 2...

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Looks like mice were living on top of the old iron head.
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Bagged and tagged.
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Then I started cleaning stuff up.

Primary cover
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Timing cover
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Oil tank

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Rocker boxes
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This doodad
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Then I found out why, maybe my gearbox was stuck in gear...
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After waiting forever for specialty tools we pulled the cam gears and shit.
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Split the cases
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Delegated girlfriend to feather all the scratches out of the tank
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She sure can polish too
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Also fixed a crease on the side and a dent you can see in the photo of gf with the DA, then primed.
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Then bought some parts for when the barrel is back from machining...
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Rob from Bullit got me a seat, some bars, and this thing....
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You can see in this photo that I've switched to unit forks and front wheel as well as unit rear wheel. I retained the pre unit triples because they are offset and give it a better stance. I will be lowering the front a bit as well. Wheels are going all black, frame all black, and tank will be red/off white like a Stiegl can.

Using these badges, knee pads, and luggage rack...
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Then... after I did all that work with stripper/wire wheels... we got a media blaster...
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mmmm so good
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Other than that, like I said, waiting for the barrel to come back, pistons are stock compression 0.20 over.

Still need to order a bunch of things:
Magneto
Tires
Oil hard lines
Wiring
Headlight
Tail light
Rear fender
Plate all the hardware.... etc. lots of stuff left

Anyhow, I wanted to share with you guys, so I hope you enjoy looking at what I've done so far on my first bike.
 
ooooooooo............While the work is fairly impressive, I'm more impressed with your ability to get your gf to sand and polish. :eek: subscribed....
 
Neat bike.

Where are you located? Never know, there may be a member or members close enough to give you a hand or let you root through their parts stashes...
 
Nice work so far, I am guessing since you have a Rogers phone and the GF is dressed for winter you live in Canada someplace LOL. Welcome to DTT great first post.

Maritime
 
Maritime said:
Nice work so far, I am guessing since you have a Rogers phone and the GF is dressed for winter you live in Canada someplace LOL. Welcome to DTT great first post.

Maritime
Scruffy said:
Neat bike.

Where are you located? Never know, there may be a member or members close enough to give you a hand or let you root through their parts stashes...

I am located in Toronto mostly, as well as Kingston, Ontario. For some reason I can't figure out how to do more than a few multi-quotes so thank you everyone for the kind words so far!
 
Following along too, and I must say you really do look like a proud mother fucker in that first pic, and rightly so!
 
went up to the shop today to do some work... blasted and painted the triple trees, tank mount, etc.

blasted the head some more too (took hours) then cleaned it up and painted it...head and jug will both be the cast iron colour

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yum..
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Then I took my perfectly good Sully's seat, drilled the rivets out and stripped it down to pan... seat foam was too thick and i didn't like how it was bent... So it's going to have a steeper kick and narrower at the front. I'm also going to try to fab up a leaf spring for a cleaner look. Pics of that to follow later this week
 
Ok, so I attempted a leaf spring seat today...

Here's what I started with.. 2" flat bar, trailer leaf spring, and the shell of a Sully's seat.
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Drew some lines...
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Did some men's knitting to attach the tabs to the flat bar (since I can't weld spring steel) and offset the tabs - not fully shaped yet, just roughed in, I finished with metal files and did not take any photos
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Going to shorten it obviously, but it looks like it might work...
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I may also look for a 3" leaf so I can chop it and use the shackle as a mount opposed to running steel and spring steel...

Thoughts?

To adjust for height and what not, the hole you see in the last photo will have a bolt out of the bottom that I can rest on the frame to adjust height and give it something to spring against...
 
Awesome start! I'm also in Toronto - can't wait to see this thing on the road hopefully soon!
 
I like the way the hard tail bolts on to the frame. Just wondering why you changed it. For more stretch or was the old one rusted out? The rebuild is looking awesome! Good luck.
 
woodsv said:
I like the way the hard tail bolts on to the frame. Just wondering why you changed it. For more stretch or was the old one rusted out? The rebuild is looking awesome! Good luck.

It bolts to the frame the same way the factory rigid does. The factory piece had been repaired at one point by the po, whoever that was, and it was slightly tweaked. I also wanted more stretch and drop. This completely transforms it.
 
Didn't like how the seat bracket was mounted only to the lug and some weld... So my next design has no welding and some thicker brackets. The majority of the load will go to the sidecar mounting spot (obviously not in use) with the seat lug being retained so it doesn't twist, then a hole behind it for the eye of the leaf spring...

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Oh and I picked this up....
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Wasn't in the best of shape aesthetically so I masked it off and blasted it.
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Fresh out of the oven with the head on it
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Then we fiddled around for a while with the con rods and crank. For some reason, at some point, someone had put copper shims in between the bearing cap and the con rod. So we did some measuring with the micrometer and it looked like we had lots of clearance.. Put con rod on the crank and one side was fine, the other side was tighter than a nun's bum.

Turns out that when whoever put it together before us got the bearing caps and con rods all mixed up. We turned the con rods 180 and one bearing cap had to be swapped to the opposite configuration than they had before. Doing this both con rods moved freely without the shims...

After all that I started to clean them up... Here's one done. They'll get new bushes and nuts too once we assemble.
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Got my hardware ready for plating and also painted the first colour on my tank... have yet to cut or buff..

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Big parts order comes in, then I start to assemble.
 
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