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