BMW R65 Restoration - Part 1

Greetings friends,

I've definitely sent myself down a rabbit hole with this project. There's a lot of skill and knowledge needed to undertake this project, but I'm excited to get into it. This will probably be updated over a long period of time, very likely a year at least.

I've done what no wife wants to hear her husband has done... I bought a motorcycle...

Now before you get too worked-up, I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear it has no engine, and in fact has no chance of travelling at any appreciable speed for the foreseeable future! 

This was a lucky find on Craigslist, a previously wrecked frame, which in essence are just parts for the eventual rebuild. A seat was included with the bike, but I removed it for the following pictures.

Pre-cleaning, the bike has a fair amount of grime and dirt on it.

A quick pressure-wash makes quick work of it and leaves it looking nice!
Or at least, a good starting point.

The forks sustained the bulk of the damage, so will need to be rebuilt, or replaced outright. The rear fender is broken, but probably easy to replace. Originally an R65LS, I plan to restore this bike with mostly stock-parts, but I plan to add some light mods, and make it a little more minimalist. I very much enjoy the cafe-racer style, and I think that would suit this project well especially since this will not be an all-weather or highway-driven bike. Ideally, at least to get the bike operational, I'd like to source used parts and do as much dirty work myself as I can. I'll start with the components needed to actually get the bike moving, and focus more on aesthetics later on in the project.

Wheel & Forks Repair

To start things off, I am removing the front wheel. It appears as though the only damage to the rim is the obvious dent... I'll be taking this to a rim repair specialist to see if they can salvage it; I don't trust myself to fix a dent this big. I'm eager to hear whether or not it can be fixed.

With the wheel off, I can really get an idea of how bad the forks are. At the very least, the tubes will need replacing, and it's possible I could salvage the sliders. In any case, I think ordering a used replacement is in order. Will update on the next post what I'm able to find.

Thanks for reading,

Juju

Maple Slab Coffee Table - Part 1

Greetings friends,

This project has been a blast to work on, and hopefully the second part will follow somewhat quickly. In any case, this won't be a super drawn-out project; I anticipate it only being written in up in 2 parts.



September 2018

My parents had a large maple tree on their property which for years had shown signs of rot, with falling dead branches posing a hazard to their house. When they started talking about getting the tree cut down, I saw the potential to create a unique coffee table from a cross-section slab of the tree!

Astonishingly, a mushroom was growing in isolated darkness inside of the rotted tree!

Not surprisingly, the tree was revealed to be extremely rotted near the base. Luckily, this meant whatever usable portions of wood I could find were beautifully spalted! I rented myself a chainsaw, and went to town!!!

Pretty rough looking to start, my chainsaw skills are quite unrefined. Loads of fun though to have given it a shot! At this point there wasn't much else to do other to let the slab start drying. Because of the rot, the wood was soaking wet; pushing a finger into the wood resulted in water dripping out...

December 2018

The slab was able to dry for a few months, though the weather in my area was still consistently wet.. After being cut, the slab was close to 6 inches thick, which drove my decision to reduce the thickness at this point, rather than waiting 5+ years for it to dry completely (following the 1 year per inch rule). A thinner slab would then dry considerably faster. I decided to use my router with a 1.5" bit to hopefully make the work pretty simple.

Loads of sawdust resulted, but after many hours the job was done!

I constructed a simple rail system to flatten the slab, which then required two people to push the router back and forth to remove material. My brother helped me for a good 10 hours slowly shaving down the surfaces of the slab to a reasonable thickness before finally letting it sit to dry. We removed a total of about 3 inches of wood, roughly 1/8" at a time. I anticipated that the slab would still warp to some extent, so I did not take the it to the final thickness at this point, hence the still-visible chainsaw marks on both sides.

Interestingly, while routing we ran into two nails that had presumably been hammered in my our dad a number of years ago. Even looks like some rot reached the tips of the nails over the years!

For size reference, here are me and my brother 

with the slab, we're both 193-195cm tall.

July 2019

A warm summer was very welcome, and seemed to make quick work of drying the slab. It had lost a considerable amount of weight, and at least at the surface was quite dry. I was getting impatient and wanted to bring the slab to a somewhat-usable state.

I bought a random orbit sander and got to work. The routed surface of the slab was very rough, likely due to the fact that the wood was so wet when I did the routing. This added a little extra work when it came to sanding, but a few hours of effort brought me to a spot where I could feel happy looking at it every day. Two coats of linseed oil later, and the slab now sits comfortably in front of the couch! I was amazed at the level of figuring and spalting in this wood, it's really spectacular to look at.

Sanded down a bit, the real colors start to pop!

Here are a few views of the sanded slab in what will be it's final location. Two coats of linseed oil have really brought out the colors, and highlight some of the figuring. We'll be using this as a coffee table until I take the time to complete the project.

But.... there's a lot left to finish on the table... Like I suspected, the top surface has cupped, so a few final passes with the router will be needed to get that flat again, as well as to take out the chainsaw gouge. But since it's looking pretty nice at this point, I will be holding off on doing the finishing touches until the slab has for sure dried completely. I'm curious about drying rates of endgrain vs facegrain, since the slab seemed to dry very quickly... I'll dig into that topic and report when I post the next part of this project. If anyone has any insight on this topic, please post below!

Thanks for reading,

Juju

BMW Seat Rail Extensions

Just a quick little post for a fun little project!

Those who know me personally know that I'm always on the search for leg room... As a 6'4" man, my knees generally wind up pushing on the backs of seats in cars, buses, airplanes, etc... Of course, I also run into this issue when sitting behind the wheel.

Tired of my knees constantly hitting the steering wheel of my 3-series, I decided it's time to do something about it. Shocked by the outrageous cost of some custom options, I opted to take care of this job myself.

With the driver seat as far back as possible, my Bimmer still had about 4 inches of room between the back of the seat and the rear passenger seat. Since the seat will still be adjustable post-modification, I figured why not take advantage of all the room I can get?!

A quick trip to Home Depot got me two steel bars, 36" long, 0.25" thick, and 1.5" wide. For only $20, I really can't complain! I knew that my rails would have to be at least 14"+, which is why I opted to get two steel bars instead of just one.

Removing the seat was surpisingly easy, but it uncovered 25 years of gunk! Kidding, it's not like this is the first time the interior has seen a shopvac... But the dust and dirt that accumulates underneath the seat brackets is impossible to reach without removing the seat, so I took the time to get it all cleaned out and nice.

                                   There's crud down there, but it's not too bad...

                                            Just vac it up and it's good as new!

I measured 14" center-to-center between the mounting bolts, which gave me the minimum distance I needed for my brackets. Adding the 4" extra legroom I wanted plus 2 x 0.75" to account for the holes being drilled offset from the end of the brackets, my total required length is 19.5" per bracket. I cut mine to 20", just to give myself a little wiggle room if I needed it.

Cutting the brackets and drilling the holes was a breeze. After very careful measuring and marking, the holes came out nicely centered, and I used a countersink bit to de-burr the edges of the holes. Not perfect, but it definitely did the job.

A little wipe-down with some IPA removed the grease, and the brackets were ready to go! I knocked down any sharp corners with a file. I decided to leave the brackets unpainted to reduce rub-off on the upholstery.

Installing the brackets onto the frame was simple enough, I just used the hardware that was originally used to mount the seat:

The bolts pictured above unfortunately we're not compatible, as the nuts were too large and did not give enough clearance for the seat to slide, so I had to remove the whole assembly again and find new bolts... The best replacement was an allen-head bolt with accompanying washer and nut. 

                                            "We've got clearance, Clarence..."

I used a wrench to hold the bolts in place underneath the rails while I mounted the seat from above. There was not much clearance below the brackets, but luckily the wrench could slide under. This was very effective, and made the installation much easier.

With the seat on top, it was just a matter of screwing the bold into all four bolts! Tightened down, the seat was very rigid, no instability or wiggling of any kind.

Now there's very little space for a backseat passenger when fully pushed back, but the seat will still adjust if needed. Generally I don't carry many passengers, so no issue.

                                       Now that's what I call leg room! Success!

Overall this was a fun and simple project. Aside from the frustration of having the wrong bolts at first, everything came together smoothly!

Thanks for reading,

Juju