No motorcycle needs a speedo the size of a dinner plate.

So, eBay to the rescue, for a tiny chinese masterpiece of engineering – or something close.

I must have spent an hour trying different spots to mount the new speedo.
High vs Low.
Central vs Offset.
Visible vs Stylish.

Lots of staring, wondering, figuring, measuring. My favourite spot would have meant extending the speedo cable. Of course. The story of my life is that wires and cables are always 1 inch too short.

Despite thinking that I’d never make a decision, one was made, and I mounted the little gem using one side of the original bracket mounts on the triple clamp.

I marked the original speedo reading onto the new one.

Brake lights. Tail lights. Rego plate illumination.

The original combo was hideous.

Big and bulbous and anything but subtle.

When I cut the seat down for the first time, it never improved my mood when I looked at it.
I tried a couple of relocations on for size, but that didn’t help either.

So it was eBay time again. I found a little brake/tail combo that came with a rego plate holder. Sweet. I mocked up a little cowl shape, but decided that would be a little bit too “café” for my current thinking (I was leaning more “brat style” by this time).

The wiring went into a cable tube, very neat, and I was relatively happy until I realised that the difference between the tail light and the brake light was about 2% brightness.

I had a couple of eBay LED lamps hanging around (I had thought to use them as headlights at one stage) so I added some red plastic to the lenses, and mounted them as brake lights. Much brighter, much safer feeling, and didn’t mess with the aesthetic.

A couple months later, I found a reflector at the hardware store, and chopped it up to make better lenses. The original tail/brake globe blew out, so I replaced it and rewired the tail light to be a tail light, decoupling it from the brakes.

To get the bike running originally, I bought a super lightweight (in fact “Anti-gravity”) battery. In this picture you can see the starter motor that died.

As wonderfully lightweight as that battery was, it didn’t accept a charge, and died completely (perhaps it went out in sympathy with the starter?). I had bought it from Northside Motorcycles and they were great – they fully refunded, and sold me a more traditional battery.

When I had the bike offline for a couple of years, that traditional RoadStar battery also kicked the bucket. I guess I should have kept it topped with water/acid and maybe even charged it a couple of times. Oh well. It weighed a ton, and had to be mounted upright.

 

When I repositioned and reworked all the electrics leter on, I bought a Motobatt glass mat unit.

“Maintenance free, never needs water, install-and-go” according to the words boldly printed on its resplendent sealed yellow casing.

It isn’t small, it isn’t big, and it can be mounted on its side under the seat. Perfect.

 

 

I crafted a simple battery holder using galvanised strap iron – pop riveted to the seat mount, and designed to hang in place over the frame. No frame modification, so I’m clean with the design rules. A couple of coats of etch primer, then gloss black.

The battery is now held in place by a combination of inertia, the electric cables, some wishful thinking, and a block of foam under the seat.

I painted the “bottom half” of the battery with black gloss so that it would not be so obvious, and all is well.
Apart from receiving a couple of dents when the seat was too close, this setup has worked fine for months.

So, this was my original concept – to replace the big old headlamp with a tiny LED light fitting… maybe a second one as a high beam… all snuck into the nooks of the headstem.

 

Of course, I may yet do that at a later date. But in the interests of getting the machine finished and registered in time for the Distinguished Gentlemans Ride, I went down the safer (and maybe more sensible) route of putting the basic headlight structure back.

 

The traditional headlight-as-a-wiring-box makes a lot of sense. It’s mostly waterproof, it is close to the handlebars and switches and lighting. And there’s plenty of room for connectors and wires.

The original trim had some dings and scratches, which added to the patina consistent with the age of the bike. The glass was fogged and dirty – but I discovered that a rag on a stick, doused in metholated spirits, worked wonders to bring back the clarity of the glass.

I was a bit grumpy about having to drop my original plans, but I’m happy with how it turned out in the end.

The bike came with these enormous chrome mufflers. I’m sure someone thought they looked good, and I’m sure they were de-rigeur a few decades back. But they’re just not to my liking.

I did a bunch of research through the Australian Design Rules and discovered that a 1982 motorbike needs to comply with the rules of 1982 – which means that its exhaust noise is not allowed to exceed 100dB. That’s plenty loud, and around 4 times louder than the current 94dB allowed. I decide to go with some shorty mufflers.

After messing about with trying to fit them onto the existing rusty old pipes, I sent them out to get new stainless straight pieces welded on, to replace the dinged up straights.
I guess some previous owners dropped the bike or otherwise hit rocks – who knows.

I pop riveted the mufflers onto the new stainless pipes, made a couple of hangers from some shiny chromed steel bits I had lying around the workshop – drilled and bent them to shape, and added a couple of plumbing brackets to hold them to the frame. No welding (that’s a no-no according to the same Design Rules that I leveraged for the noise levels) so I had to be creative.

Of course, no self-respecting café racer or brat bike would be seen without fibreglass pipe wraps. I discovered this stuff is NASTY on the hands, so I got serious gloves to work with it.
The accepted wisdom is to wet the wrap, and wind it tightly from the cylinder head down… but nobody tells you that the damn thing is always 6 inches too short… and that you have to take 3 tries at getting it just right, unravelling and starting again.

In the end it worked fine. I was concerned that I’d got grubby fingerprints on the pristine white wraps, but that concern evaporated after a few rides – it all evens out to a slightly burned patina!

 

I ended up with two sets of front forks.

Brother Jeff turned up one day with a spare set he had lying around. So I spruced up those ones, and swapped out the fork sets at leisure.

It was about half way through that I realised a motorcycle workshop stand would have been a good investment. Teetering on a rickety plastic milk crate is just depressing – you’re constantly diving to catch 100kg of motorcycle that’s intent on falling to the ground for no good reason.

And when you do catch it, you wish you hadn’t – there’s nowhere stable to put it. So you juggle and jiggle and fight the thing back onto the rickety milk crate – which is of course 50mm too high, so you have to lift the teetering bike as well, while it actively continues its suicidal plummet.

I opted for a brushed alloy finish, to match the brushed metal fuel tank.

The bike started life as a two seater. I wanted it to be a single seater – so I could take of all the extra footpegs and framework, and of course make this HUGE seat a lot more compact and low profile.

I guess I liked the look of the  BRAT style motorbikes – classic twin shock machines with a flat seat and minimal lines of a café racer.

So I took the vinyl cover off – it was lightly glued, indicating that it was a re-skin by an earlier owner.

The next obvious step was to cut downthe seat pan and shape the foam.

This is the plastic seat pan, and you can see the leftover staple lines. Plus the rusty seat mount.

No matter how long I looked at this, I wasn’t happy with using even this cut-down version.

According to the local road rules, I can build my own seat as long as it uses the original seat mounting points.

So I formulate the idea that I can make one out of a sheet of plywood and a few layers of some sort of foam.

After watching a bunch of YouTube videos on the subject, and getting sidetracked by this Ichiban Moto video, I started to feel confident that I could make my own seat from scratch. I started by cutting out a sheet of EVA foam to get the shape and have something to stare at for a few hours. Once I had the shape, I made a plywood base.

I bought some 12mm PE30 foam and laminated a few sheets with contact adhesive to get the right height. For the top layer, I created a split piece with a strip of softer foam down the middle, to soften the blows on my nether regions. At this point, it’s just an oversize block shape.

The seat needs to mate with the original mounting points – a slot at the front, and 2 rubber spots at the rear. So I bolted on a piece of steel, and bent/cut it to fit.

I added a sort of rubber bumper strip around the plywood, and glued on the laminated foam. Once it was on the bike, I shaped the foam with a hacksaw, then a surform tool, then some coarse sandpaper. The rear sat on the rubber bumpers, and I held it in position with a pair of bungee cords around the original mounting points, which I had thankfully not cut off during the bobbing.

I spent ages looking for some black vinyl to cover the new seat – then one day I spotted an old couch thrown in the street for council pickup. Presto! I now had several meters of upholstery grade black vinyl. I also inherited a ridiculous amount of fine, loose, skanky old foam filling, which flew everywhere when I first unzipped the cushion.

Out with the sewing machine. It’s just a cheap old sewing machine, but did a surprisingly good job. I made a rough pattern from an old sheet, tweaked and modified that, took it apart, and used that as a pattern for the vinyl. Even so, I still needed to unpick and redo the vinyl cover before I was happy with the result. The coverings were simply stapled onto the plywood base.

Now the result was fine… but I really thought it would look much finer if I covered it in leather. My budget didn’t stretch to buying a hide. So I went on a scavenger hunt, and discovered a second-hand women’s jacket at the local op-shop for $20. With some judicious planning and some careful cutting, I made a copy of the vinyl pattern and added the leather as a second skin. Now I have the waterproof vinyl and the sharp leather appearance.