MT250 Knobby Vintage Streetfighting Cafe Scrambling Rat Tracker

Floyd650 said:

Hey. I see that you spend a lot of your personal time sitting in front of your computer posting on this board (Over 4000 times in just two years!). I don't spend a lot of time on the computer or the internet, so I have never had to deal with someone posting unsolicited and generally negative comments about my work. Rather than get into a posting argument on a public board with you, I'm going to PM you my phone number. If you feel so compelled by what you see here that you need to tell me what I'm doing wrong, by all means call me. Or, given that you are in Grants Pass, OR, next time you ride your motorcycle to Portland, why don't you swing on by my shop in person and tell me. Otherwise, to quote everyone's mother: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Or, maybe don't read my thread...

In any case, to the presumed relief of other readers, I'll be ignoring you while I build my bike.

Thanks,
Alex

Click to expand...

Hahahaha, YESSSSS!

How did I miss this thread until now? I am sooo subscribed! Rock on!

The chopped-off ducati seat was too small to use as a mold for a cowl. I eye-balled all the stuff that needed to go under the cowl (battery, fuse box, blinker relay, etc) and started building the foam up. Initially I thought I could get away with two-part epoxy putty and some wire mesh.

A little more...

My riding/building partner, Luke ,welded the rear hoop and some mounting tabs for the floor of the electronics compartment...

And a steering stop so my montser forks don't kill my tank...

I added Bondo to the foam to begin to build it up. I had no idea how far from being done I was at this point. I perpetually thought that I was about a month away from being done building the cowl.

I thought I was getting close, but I was wrong every time I thought that.

There were really two big obstacles to trying to making it perfect. One was that it was hard to figure out how to measure/compare the symmetry of one side of the cowl to the other. And two, I quickly realized that the bike and seat were not actually perfectly symmetric, as nothing really is if you get down to a perfectionist's level. This little gadget was my best friend for a long time.

Floyd650 said:

Hey. I see that you spend a lot of your personal time sitting in front of your computer posting on this board (Over 4000 times in just two years!). I don't spend a lot of time on the computer or the internet, so I have never had to deal with someone posting unsolicited and generally negative comments about my work. Rather than get into a posting argument on a public board with you, I'm going to PM you my phone number. If you feel so compelled by what you see here that you need to tell me what I'm doing wrong, by all means call me. Or, given that you are in Grants Pass, OR, next time you ride your motorcycle to Portland, why don't you swing on by my shop in person and tell me. Otherwise, to quote everyone's mother: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Or, maybe don't read my thread...

In any case, to the presumed relief of other readers, I'll be ignoring you while I build my bike.

Thanks,
Alex

Click to expand...

Where's the like button?

Floyd650 said:

There were really two big obstacles to making it perfect. One was that it was hard to figure out how to measure/compare the symmetry of one side of the cowl to the other. And two, I quickly realized that the bike and seat were not actually perfectly symmetric, as nothing really is if you get down to a perfectionist's level. This little gadget was my best friend for a long time.

Click to expand...

I have one of those contour tools as well and have been using it the past week, great tools. I need to find a better one though, mine is a cheapy.

So I was going through my photos trying to retrace my steps for this thread. During the last year, I've sort of lost track about why this project has taken me so long. Looking through all my photos, I realized that I have had a lot of other things going. I couldn't help posting these moto-related pictures of last winter's surprise snowstorm in the Portland area. Luke and I had been riding the day it rolled in, and it was pretty awesome. Worthy of a little tangent.





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It really got gnarly on the drive home...


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Riding season was over for a while... Back to building...


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Nice bike you are building there. All kinds of stuff gets in the way of our projects don't they?

Slowly it evolved closer to what i was imagining, but the idea that I would simpley chop off the back of the ducati seat and make a mold out of that was totally out the window. This became a very detail-oriented and slow process. For a while I had some hopes to get the bike done in time for Portland's One motorcycle show, but I realized that I was really enjoying the project, and imposing someone else's timeline made it less fun and in a weird way less honest. I wasn't making a bike for other people.

After getting it just right, I painted it with high-build epoxy primer (http://www.eastwood.com/2k-areo-spray-high-build-urethane-primer-gray.html?reltype=2&parent_id=47967) which adds maybe 1 mm of thickness to the surface and is rock-hard. This allows you to sand it and polish it to a super smooth, shiny surface.

This is probably the right time to quickly go over the whole concept of making a cowl from scracth. I kept describing the process to friends as: "making the thing, to make the thing, to make the thing." That is to say that what I have been making is called the plug. It is an exact replica of the part I'm trying to make. It is the first "thing." You use this to make a mold (the second "thing") that is an exact reverse shape of the part you want. Then, using the mold, you lay up carbon fiber and resin, which when removed from the mold will be the third, final "thing," your part. The benefit of doing it this way is that once I have a mold, I can crank out as many seat cowls as I want, relatively easily. This is a sort of useless goal, given that my cowl is specifcally for my bike, and I have no ambition of cranking out a million (unless somebody out there was dying to have one...). But I really wanted to learn the process...

So here is the plug, painted, sanded, polished and ready to make the mold. What you see around the edge of the plug is modeling clay. Because the final part is going to be molded on the top and the bottom, I actually had to make two molds, to make two parts (the top and bottom of the cowl) and then glue them together. If that's confusing now, it'll be clearer in a few more posts.

So I waxed the plug (which sounds dirty) and sprayed it with mold release, then covered it with gel coat and fiberglass. I crossed my fingers and let it sit for 24 hours.

When I popped out the plug, this is what I saw.

Now in order to make the bottom of the cowl, I need a mold of that section, too. So I put the plug back into the first mold, waxed it all up again, sprayed it with mold release and repeated the operation.