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