BMW R65 Restoration - Part 6 - Handle Bars, Carburetors, Chokes, and Throttle

Greetings friends,

This is a continuation of my series of posts documenting the restoration of my BMW R65. For the previous post in this series, click here.

Today we're going to jam a lot of small steps into a single blog post. In the last post I mounted the engine and transmission into the frame of the bike, and today we're attaching most of the peripheral equipment that the engine needs to run.

Let's start with the carburetors. These guys were in pretty good shape, and as far as attaching them to the engine, they were surprisingly easy, as there's a rubber sleeve that clamps onto the carb, connecting it into the intake of the corresponding cylinder. The backside of the carbs have fittings to allow the throttle cables and choke cables to be attached, and a small hose barb for the fuel line. We'll touch on each of these as each is installed. As part of the restoration/modification of this bike, I'm going for somewhat of a "Cafe Racer" style, which commonly uses pod-type filters on the carburetor inlets, which can be seen below. The filters mounted with a rubber sleeve exactly how the carbs mount to the cylinder.

The airbox that came with these bikes was pretty ugly in my opinion, so at least for now I'm forgoing trying to find a used airbox and simply eliminating it for the individual filters, and covering the top of the engine/starter motor with a nice cover. There is much debate in the community surrounding the impact on the engine of pod-filters vs airboxes, but for the sake of simplicity this is what I'm doing for now.

Pod filters fit right onto the carbs!

This motorcycle was originally equipped with choke cables that were manipulated with a knob mounted on the handlebars, but for an overall cleaner as less-cluttered look, I decided to forgo the cables and use "Choke Pull Tabs" instead. These tabs are thin wires connected to aluminum knobs that attach directly to the carburetor and allow fast choke (dis)engagement. The only disadvantage to the tabs is that each one needs to be pulled by itself, whereas the original choke cables would have pulled both chokes simultaneously. This isn't an issue since it's quite easy to stop for a sec and pull them to disable the choke.

It's obvious where to pull, right?

The handlebars I'm installing are unpainted stainless steel, as close in dimensions as I could get to the originals (22 mm dia.). They bolted on very easily, so there's not too much to discuss surrounding their installation.

The throttle body was a relatively cheap amazon purchase, and was a very simple fit over the end of the handlebar. The rounded end caps of the handlebar are tack-welded on, so I had to grind that back a bit to accommodate the throttle body. I lubricated the throttle body with the green grease I used for the steering bearing in a previous post. 

I purchased a throttle cable kit, which included all the necessary fittings to cut to length and assemble my own throttle cables. Using the old throttle cables as a reference, I cut the wires to length and assembled them in the same manner as the old ones. The old cables use a splitting assembly to allow one cable from the throttle body to control both butterfly valves at once. The kit I bought included this splitter, so I was able to recreate the original cables almost exactly.

   

Completed throttle cables. I forgot to take a pic of the
originals before I disassembled them...

Once the cables were fully assembled, routing them from the throttle body through the frame was simple, and the cable ends slipped nicely into the provided throttle levers on the carburetors. The levers are tucked away behind the carbs, but I'll include a picture in a different post to show them.

A little too zoomed-out, but here you can see the starter cover/airbox eliminator.

The handlebar grips were very easy to install thanks to a pro-tip from a friend of mine. Wetting the inside of the grip and the handlebar with isopropyl alcohol (IPA) allowed the grips to slide on very easily, and after the IPA evaporated overnight, the grips were super solidly in place. I did the same thing for the footrests!

There are a number of other accessories that will ultimately bolt onto the handle bars, but I think those will best be covered in a separate post. The engine electrics will also be covered separately, so for now, that's all!

Thanks for reading,

Juju

P.S. For the attentive readers in my audience, yes there are components installed on the bike that haven't been covered by this series of posts. I work on the bike as I go, and select parts to write about, but those don't always match chronologically...

Maple Slab Coffee Table - Part 2

Greetings friends,

This is the second and final part of the construction of my maple coffee table. You can view part one of this project here.

Onwards...

When we left off, the table was waiting to finish drying before a few final passes with the router to finish the top. After reading some articles online, I found that likely the slab had been sufficiently dry for some time. Apparently endgrain slabs can dry 15 TIMES FASTER than their cross-grain counterparts.¹ With no doubt in my mind, I was ready to flatten out the slab to it's final dimension.

With the same setup as before, my brother and I chipped away at the slab, and after a few hours had the top surface leveled off and looking pretty. As I had mentioned before, the whole slab had cupped slightly, so all outside edges were higher than the middle when we were flattening it. Two passes with the router and it was done! I'm so glad that the ugly gouge is gone!

Just about to get rid of the gouge...

Finished! Woohoo!

We flipped it over and decided (in order to preserve the thickness of the slab) to flatten the bottom only enough to accommodate the stand/legs that the table will sit on. If we had gone until the bottom gouge was removed, the resulting slab may have only been an inch or so thick!!! We took a belt sander to both sides of the slab to level out the router marks, and called it a day. Not bad looking for a few hours work!

At this point the long sanding process began. The slab has some lovely figuring that I wanted to showcase, and I knew that I would want to sand to at least 600 grit before applying any kind of finish. I started with 40 grit on the random orbit sander (ROS) to remove all the scratches left by the belt sander, which ended up taking the bulk of the total sanding time. Once I was satisfied at 40 grit, I gradually worked my way up the other grits until I was satisfied with the look of the figuring. I would periodically wipe on a thin layer of shellac (1# cut) to check how the figuring looked before moving on to the higher grits.

That's about as far as I got..

Once the PNW weather started turning toward the wet season, I decided to attach legs to the slab and put it into use. It may be a while before I actually before finish sanding the surface, especially since it's finding so much use as our living room table. Here's a picture of it's current state, and I'll update this post later on if and when I complete it! 

Frankly, I'm really happy with how this came together, and the finishing touches will be completed whenever there's time. I'm not holding my breath.... 😁

Thanks for reading,

Juju



1. Reeb, J. E. Drying Wood. (1992).

BMW R65 Restoration - Part 5 - Engine & Transmission

Greetings friends,

This is a continuation of my series of posts documenting the restoration of my BMW R65. For the previous post in this series, click here.

When we last left off, I had documented the process of constructing the seat for my bike, and although that step chronologically occurred after the stuff I'll be describing in this post, this blog entry comes after. This post is pretty short, and just covers the broad strokes of installing the engine and transmission.

A crucial step before installing anything heavy into the bike is installing the kickstand. The bike must be able to stand on its own for everything else to go in, so I stripped down and painted the kickstand in the same manner as the frame and subframe. Installation was simple, just screwing it into place and installing the spring that holds it up or down.

The progress up until this point! Really starting to come together 

and look good, especially with the tank in place.

The engine is a heavy bastard, but is relatively easy to install. Two long threaded rods go through the frame and engine body to hold it in place, so it was just a matter of lifting (with help) and pushing the rods through the holes. Nuts and washers hold the rod in place, and with that the engine is in! That's the end of the simple stuff, as the transmission wound up being a bit more tricky.

The transmission was odd to get into place, likely because I'm technically fitting an engine and transmission from an R100RS (980cc) into the frame of an R65LS (650cc). I don't have a lot of wiggle room behind the engine at this point. I had to unbolt the swingarm and swing the rear wheel back to ultimately attach the transmission. Luckily the transmission hooks directly to the rear end of the clutch shaft and bolts on with 4 easy bolts, so once it was in place, there were no more issues.

I bolted the swingarm back in place and admired my work! With the engine/transmission in place I can start attaching more small components, including the carburettors, the throttle, and the air intake filters. Look out for all that in the next post!

Thanks for reading,

Juju

BMW R65 Restoration - Part 4 - Building the Seat

Greetings friends,

This is a continuation of my series of posts documenting the restoration of my BMW R65. For the previous post, click here.

When we last left off, I had attached the forks and swingarm onto the frame and gotten both wheels back onto the bike. Everything is really coming together and it's starting to look the way it's supposed to! 😁

In this post I'm going to detail the process of constructing the seat, including the upholstery. I'm very inexperienced as far as sewing goes, and have never tried sewing upholstery so please forgive my beginner mistakes. As with almost everything else about this restoration, it's a learning experience.

Construction of the seat began with cutting out the base to which the foam and cover would attach. I drilled holes into a 3/4" piece of birch plywood and attached it to the subframe to trace out the silhouette of the seat. Some quick cutting with the bandsaw and sanding the rough edges gave me a finished seat base. I painted the base with black Rustoleum paint.

For the main padding layer of the seat, I used some leftover 2" Kaizen foam I had left over from another project. Kaizen is closed-cell polyethylene foam which is very firm, generally used for multi purpose storage. Using 3M adhesive spray, I attached the foam to the wooden base and cut it to shape.

To cut the contour of the foam, I opted to bolt the seat to the bike and shave foam off until I reached a comfortable shape. I didn't do anything complex, mostly just rounding off and tapering the corners so everything looked good.

The last layer of foam I added before the cover went on is a 0.5" polyurethane foam. This foam is very soft and squishy and provides a thin compressible layer for added comfort. I traced the seat onto the foam, cut it out, and stuck it to the Kaizen foam with spray adhesive (no picture, but you'll see it later).

The cover was made out of black vinyl fabric. I selected the "arctic vinyl" option since it supposedly is more resilient to colder temperatures and will resist cracking. My original plan was to sew a layer of 0.5" polyurethane foam in between two layers of vinyl to create the cushioned diamond pattern for the cover but our sewing machine isn't robust enough to go through such thick material, so I settled for a layer of quilting batting between the layers, and it gave the same kind of effect. Not as much texture as I would've liked but the effect is still nice.

I again traced the seat onto this diamond-patterned piece and sewed along the line, cutting it out to shape. I then took a "negatively-shaped" piece of vinyl and sewed it to the main piece backwards, such that when pulled out it would fold around the sides of the seat and could be stapled into place. The sewing machine skipped a lot of stitches in this step, since I was working with a lot of thick layers. Because of this, I had to go over the line a few times in places to make sure it was all secure. The end that meets the gas tank needed a connecting piece to form the corners, which was simply sewed into place.

Once the entire cover was sewed together, I sprayed the middle part with spray adhesive and stuck it to the urethane foam, if for nothing else than to keep it centered and in place for when the rest of the cover got pulled and stapled into place. That said, I unfortunately got so caught up in the act of stapling the cover on that I hardly took any pictures of the process. But as you can imagine, it involved starting with stapling the front of the cover down (pictured below) and working down the sides to the back, pulling everything even and making it nice and tight.

First you start with a few staples.... and blammo you're done!

And with that, it's done! I've gone out of order with these posts compared to the actual progress I've made on the bike, so for now I'm not going to show off the rest of the bike until a later post. When that time comes, I'll show some other angles of the seat. Overall, I'm incredibly pleased with how it looks, and I learned a lot along the way. I may redo the cover later on just to give it a nicer cleaner shot but for now I'll move on to more important parts of the restoration.

Thanks for reading,

Juju

BMW R65 Restoration - Part 3 - Forks & Swingarm

Greetings friends,

This is a continuation of my series of posts documenting the restoration of my BMW R65. For the previous post, click here.

When we last left off, I had removed the front wheel and was finding a solution for the damaged forks. I took the wheel to The Wheel Master, having heard that if there was anyone who could fix it, it'd be him. To make a long story short, the dent in the rim was too great, resulting in severe cracking when he tried to bang it out..... so that meant I had to hit eBay for a replacement. I looked for an exact copy, since the distinctive "snowflake" pattern of these wheels is quite unique and I wanted to keep them matching. For the forks, I just bought a reasonably priced replacement which simply bolted right on. Not much choice here, since the existing forks were just too bent up to be useful. However, removing the old forks turned out to be a bit of a chore! Here's what went down..

Handlebars off, top yoke ready to remove.

I first tried loosening the yoke clamps to pull out the fork tubes, but they must have been jammed in place because they simply wouldn't budge. I decided I had to remove the bottom yoke and forks in one piece. First off, the handlebars had to come off, followed by the top yoke. Once the yoke was removed, I could pull out the bearings and remove the entire lower fork assembly. Let's have a look at them:

Now that's a lot of damage!*

With the forks off, I removed the bearings and thoroughly cleaned them with engine de-greaser. The old grease was profoundly oxidized and no longer provided any lubricating properties, so naturally it had to go. The old forks were pretty useless at this point and since they were stuck in the lower yoke, I just cut the yoke off and saved the forks in case I needed any spare parts down the road.

Beautifully clean bearing!

Since a lot of effort was saved by buying new forks, I was able to move directly ahead to installing them after I painted the frame. I used Green Grease at the recommendation of my mechanic; the water resistance that it provides is ideal in this application. Though I don't plan to take the bike out in the rain, I still want to make sure that all bearings are waterproof.

Greased up, the bearings went into the steering column followed by the forks. Surprisingly, it was all very easy to install and works like a charm! The forks themselves have some gunk on them and will need to be cleaned more later on, but for now they're totally functional.

Moving on to the swingarm, there's actually not a whole lot I had to do. I removed the wheel (since it needed a new tire) and removed it from the final drive assembly simply to replace the gasket connecting the two. The swingarm attaches to the frame using two pivot bolts, and these are held in place with large nuts. The shock absorbers then attach the swingarm to the subframe, comprising the rear suspension. 

The whole rear suspension/swingarm disassembly process.

Sort of a poor picture, but this somewhat illustrates 

how the swingarm attaches to the main frame.

This all came together pretty effortlessly, so aside from both wheels still needing new tires, the front and rear suspension are both complete!

Thanks for reading,

Juju

Plague Doctor Mask

Greetings friends,

Well, we're in the midst of a global pandemic... The coronavirus has halted the economy, reached 3 million cases worldwide, and exposed which world leaders are capable of handling this type of outbreak, and which aren't...

I thought it would be wonderfully fitting to share an old project of mine, made in the fall of 2018. This was my first dive into the world of leathercrafting, and it was loads of fun to make. This will probably be a relatively short post since the majority of the project involved stitching, which let's face it is not riveting... 😜 Lets dive in!

I found the plans for this mask on Etsy. There were many choices available, but since I was looking to create the most traditional looking mask that I could, this one looked the best to me. For the sake of authenticity, I also opted to use undyed leather in the hopes that over time, a patina would develop as the mask is worn and a more weathered appearance would result. I used some dark thread as an accent for the light leather.

Working from the pattern, I cut out all the pieces required for the mask. I used a surgical-grade scalpel for cutting which created nice clean edges on all the pieces. Once everything was cut out, I punched holes along all edges that would become seams. The following pictures lay show the progression of stitching seams together one after another. Each piece builds on the one before, and the whole mask comes together rather nicely.

This piece becomes the bottom of the "beak." The holes 

punched on the sides of the seam are vents for breathing.

The two halves of the face of the mask were each stitched to their respective side 

on the bottom piece, then folded over and stitched along the top to close the beak.

The forehead piece was stitched to the top of the beak first, then connected at the sides. 

Here it's easy to see the rivet holes on the sides of the mask where the straps would attach.

Sadly, I forgot to closely document the attachment of the straps, but 

behind the head is a belt buckle that holds everything together.

I was very pleased with my handiwork, especially given my inexperience in leathercrafting. This certainly motivated me to do more leather projects, some of which have already been shown on the blog and others which will be posted later on. I ultimately would love to work on a complete plague doctor costume, but that would surely take some time!

Thanks for reading,

Juju