focusinprogress
City Limit Moto:Parts-Service-Apparel (716)8038606
A friend of mine picked this up for a song and dance and asked me to help him make a chopper out of it. It came to us as a couple boxes of parts and a loose frame. Here's the build.
pile of parts:
oh yeah, previous owner said the starter wasn't engaging....so we knew the starter clutch needed attention. Luckily, our buddy luke (whom I share the shop with) recently just repaired HIS, and knew the process and part numbers....so Luke took care of that.
He didn't care much about stretching it or anything crazy, so we Decided for ease of design and speed of fabrication to use the stock swingarm to help us build the hard tail.
Started out by mocking up most of the bike, and setting what we thought would be a decent ride height by supporting the frame with the jack. Then we chopped off the rear subframe.
Next, I had two pre-bent tubes kicking around from a hardtail kit I bought on ebay for another project a while back...so we used those to make up the tubes connecting the backbone to the axle plates.
I added an additional bend in them to get the geometry to work and notched the bottom ends to fit over the axle plate.
as seen in the picture, I happened to have some clip-ons kicking around so we tossed those on. Then we rolled up a moving blanket to see how Nick fits on it. He's getting excited about it
Found a tractor fender. Should work well. this picture also shows the extra bend I put in the tubes.
This is where things got a little tricky. These cb650's have a removable section of frame on the clutch side, so that you don't have to remove the oil pan and oil pickup to get the engine out. We wanted to retain this feature so I have to come up with a way to make that all work while still achieving the look of a chopper. I started out by bending up some fresh DOM tube to make a bottom frame leg connecting the axle plate to the bung where the removable piece bolts on, notching the back end for the axle plate and front end to encompass the stock frame bung/mount
I did the same for the other side but I guess forgot to take pics. After that, we made some cross-braces to connect the two new bottom tubes and two new down-tubes.....which also double as fender mounting and hopefully spring mounts for a seat. I seem to have forgotten to take those pics as well. (Sorry! was in a really good groove!).
Next we cut out the swingarm itself now that everything was braced nicely. Then I had a seat and stared at the side view of the bike trying to work out the best way to blend the remaining stock frame into our new hard tail. I decided that the area where the rear footpeg brackets were could be modified to make sense, while retaining stock rear brake mechanism. This spot on the stock frame sort of made a fork in the road so to speak and I cut into it to carry one tube all the way down to our new bottom tube, creating a nice triangle for strength.
so here's it all chopped up
then I made up a tube to fill it in, and a gusset plate to tie the triangle all together. Came out like this:
After cutting the remaining pieces of the stock swingarm out of the way, I welded what accessible part of the original axle plates that were now exposed to my notched bottom tubes, and then made up some gussets to triangulate the back corner.
which gives us this
I did the same to the other side basically, except a gusset near the kickstand....we liked the way it looked open and the otherside we only did the gusset to reinforce that corner where the removable frame bolts in.
feeling pretty good about the way the tail was shaping up, we started mocking up the exhaust to see what to do with it. Some precious owner cut the (probably rusted out) mufflers off so we had just the 2-1 headers to work with. I found a little moped muffler I had kicking around and tossed it on for looks.
at this point we're at a waiting point.... Nick has ordered a solo seat kit, a pair of emgo shorty mufflers similar to the moped muffler pictured, and some carb rebuild kits. I also found a wicked deal on a suzuki VZ800 inverted front end and he's ordered that up as well..... I've used the Boulevard/marauder inverted front end once before, and I'm convinced it's the BEST option for vintage bikes....the offset in the triples is dead on compared to most vintage stock triples and the length is the same as most mid-sized bikes like cb550 and such. much easier/safer than trying to put sportbike forks on which are shorter and majorly mess with trail measurements.
anyhow, that's where we're at for now....when some more parts come in we'll update with the installs! Thanks for looking!
pile of parts:
oh yeah, previous owner said the starter wasn't engaging....so we knew the starter clutch needed attention. Luckily, our buddy luke (whom I share the shop with) recently just repaired HIS, and knew the process and part numbers....so Luke took care of that.
He didn't care much about stretching it or anything crazy, so we Decided for ease of design and speed of fabrication to use the stock swingarm to help us build the hard tail.
Started out by mocking up most of the bike, and setting what we thought would be a decent ride height by supporting the frame with the jack. Then we chopped off the rear subframe.
Next, I had two pre-bent tubes kicking around from a hardtail kit I bought on ebay for another project a while back...so we used those to make up the tubes connecting the backbone to the axle plates.
I added an additional bend in them to get the geometry to work and notched the bottom ends to fit over the axle plate.
as seen in the picture, I happened to have some clip-ons kicking around so we tossed those on. Then we rolled up a moving blanket to see how Nick fits on it. He's getting excited about it
Found a tractor fender. Should work well. this picture also shows the extra bend I put in the tubes.
This is where things got a little tricky. These cb650's have a removable section of frame on the clutch side, so that you don't have to remove the oil pan and oil pickup to get the engine out. We wanted to retain this feature so I have to come up with a way to make that all work while still achieving the look of a chopper. I started out by bending up some fresh DOM tube to make a bottom frame leg connecting the axle plate to the bung where the removable piece bolts on, notching the back end for the axle plate and front end to encompass the stock frame bung/mount
I did the same for the other side but I guess forgot to take pics. After that, we made some cross-braces to connect the two new bottom tubes and two new down-tubes.....which also double as fender mounting and hopefully spring mounts for a seat. I seem to have forgotten to take those pics as well. (Sorry! was in a really good groove!).
Next we cut out the swingarm itself now that everything was braced nicely. Then I had a seat and stared at the side view of the bike trying to work out the best way to blend the remaining stock frame into our new hard tail. I decided that the area where the rear footpeg brackets were could be modified to make sense, while retaining stock rear brake mechanism. This spot on the stock frame sort of made a fork in the road so to speak and I cut into it to carry one tube all the way down to our new bottom tube, creating a nice triangle for strength.
so here's it all chopped up
then I made up a tube to fill it in, and a gusset plate to tie the triangle all together. Came out like this:
After cutting the remaining pieces of the stock swingarm out of the way, I welded what accessible part of the original axle plates that were now exposed to my notched bottom tubes, and then made up some gussets to triangulate the back corner.
which gives us this
I did the same to the other side basically, except a gusset near the kickstand....we liked the way it looked open and the otherside we only did the gusset to reinforce that corner where the removable frame bolts in.
feeling pretty good about the way the tail was shaping up, we started mocking up the exhaust to see what to do with it. Some precious owner cut the (probably rusted out) mufflers off so we had just the 2-1 headers to work with. I found a little moped muffler I had kicking around and tossed it on for looks.
at this point we're at a waiting point.... Nick has ordered a solo seat kit, a pair of emgo shorty mufflers similar to the moped muffler pictured, and some carb rebuild kits. I also found a wicked deal on a suzuki VZ800 inverted front end and he's ordered that up as well..... I've used the Boulevard/marauder inverted front end once before, and I'm convinced it's the BEST option for vintage bikes....the offset in the triples is dead on compared to most vintage stock triples and the length is the same as most mid-sized bikes like cb550 and such. much easier/safer than trying to put sportbike forks on which are shorter and majorly mess with trail measurements.
anyhow, that's where we're at for now....when some more parts come in we'll update with the installs! Thanks for looking!
