TIRES!!!!!!!

Jesse went and picked up our tire order from coker today! This is what 18 tires look like lol..


lol

Inner primary time!

I finally finished these inner primaries just in time to get them off to the painters. Life is good in the 605.... Next week I will be able to set up the primaries on a couple knuckleheads !

transmission filler repair from the vault.

Sometimes filler plugs are so worn out that a heli coil will not work. When this happens, you have to weld the hole up, re spot face it, re drill it and re thread it.....


What a bunch of work.



And getting tapped, go get some!

cannonball support rig!

Tim worked away on the sidecar frame for one of our cannonball support bikes today. My dad, Larry Medwig and Tim will be running sidecar support on the upcoming cannonball run and picking up all of the broken down bikes. We are building flatbed trailers for sidecar chassis that look like little chariots. Check out this beautiful joint that Tim made for the chassis This is a real thing of beauty


OOOOHHHHH nice weld!!!!



Here is a shot of the whole thing. Tim is making the top rail right now, in fact it will probably be ready to weld by the time I go back to the shop! Have a nice night.

parts, frames and ferners

Check out the1913 to 1916 sears twin muffler castings that I got for approval today. The aluminum ones on the left were the samples that I got from Steve Huntzinger, and the cast iron ones are the ones that i had made. I am happy with them.


I also welded the foot board frames on the 47 frame that I am workin on. The weld on the cross plate is just fill and cosmetic. Somebody had cut the bar to look like a panhead frame. Knuckle bars wrap all the way around the tube, so I had to fill it in. Once I am done , I will post a pic or two.



And the first guest for our birthday party on Saturday showed up.....all the way from Gibraltar. Tim is back in South Dakota, I already put him to work lol.

mold and clarity

I found my coffee cup this morning. It had been missing for over two weeks. This is some pretty disgusting stuff. I threw it away/ We had a good run together mr. coffee cup. god speed.


I also got this 38 frame glued back together. This picture was taken yesterday I already have the grinding roughed in. Hopefully I will have it done this weekend.



I also got some more site gauges for oil tanks. My daddy and I have been working on this project for over a year. What a struggle, It will be sweet when they are done though!

christmas in april

There are two really cool things in this picture. 1. Our new knucklehead cases that we got in the mail. The fellow that I bought them from said they were 40 cases, but when they showed up today I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they were 41 fl cases. Which is awesome since we don't need another 40. The second cool thing in this picture is my foot, please notice that I am wearing sandals which is great for south dakota. Life is good in the 605


Typical break in the left case and motor mount repairs. UH OH the gene rater mount is missing, I wonder where I could find one of those??? lol



Matched cases woo hoo. These cases were a fair price and I didn't really ask the fellow for too many details since I was so happy to get them. I really lucked out so this is a great deal!!!!!!!!




I spent the rest of the day straightening a 37 frame and welding this late 47 together. Check out this link to see it coming together. I should have it done by the end of the weekend!http://oldbikesinsd.blogspot.com/2010/03/frame-pics.html

36 detail pics

I installed the rear brake today. Two of the back lug nuts are originals, I have five more for the front. Check out the nickle plated outer star cover and the cad plated inner star cover. HD stopped plating inner star covers in 37, most of them were natural finish after that. There is a lot of neat stuff going on in this pic!


And the other side, This brake set up looks so much better than the later ones. I like how the plating looks on early axle nuts.



man o man




Here is the throttle cable hooked up. The Ferrell is an nos. one. Check out how wavy the edge is. I would like to see how these were made 70 years ago!





Check out the machined finish on the trans top screws. This is a really nice pre war detail. HD seemed to switch to the cheaper looking screws sometime during the war. Also check out the 36 only shift drum shaft!

CHOKE!

Check out the difference in the clips and the choke levers. The long lever was 36-37 and the short clip is for 36 to 39!


I set up the coil on Doug's 36 today. Check out the o.g. globe spark plug! These are really really rare.



The packing nuts are oem as is the coil. I wrap them with duct tape and use a set of pliers that I bored the jaws out on to tighten them up. This seems like a lot of work, but it protects the knurls on the nut and keeps the plating nice and shiny!




Ta Da! I made up the spark plug nuts on a turret lathe when I was in high school. I made 300 of them, and now I am down to 70. They are correct for pre 45 models.

THROTTLE CABLE TIME!!!!!!!!!

So I am moving along onto controls on the 36 that I am working on. I have been saving nos cables for it for quite some time. There are nice repros available on the market, but they are not quite as nice as brand new 70 year old cables! Here is one of them all wrapped up in cosmoline.


It is very tricky to get all of that junk off with out damaging the cable, I got it though!

36 dash wiring!

Well I wired up the dash on a 36 today. I have a bunch of nos switch wire terminals that I have been saving for ever. Check out the little green wire, the first step is to strip the cloth off of the wire, then split the exposed wire into two parts, then dip it in flux.

Then you crimp the terminal around the threaded part of the wire. and wrap the two pieces of twisted wire around the terminal. Once this is done, you can solder the wire.

Here it is all done, I found an original oil gauge for this bike and will be rebuilding it shortly. I guess I still have to hook up the speedo light, but that isn't to big of a deal.

Pictures of 46s in Texas!

Well my daddy spent last week in Texas. He is an ace motorcycle mechanic and an all around good dude, but he isn't good at taking pictures. Luckily for me and you-some of my friends emailed me some pics of his adventure. Here is a pic of our 46 with a banana peel



Here is a pic of my daddy with the 46 that we built for Robert last year, this is one of the pretttiest bikes that we have ever built I love it.




And another pic of my dad and Dewey. Thanks for the pics Robert and Ken!

db 36

Here is the ignition switch for Doug's 36. It looks dull in this picture for some reason. I think that it caught a strange reflection from my camera's flash. Anyways, the radius on the flipper is different on pre war switches. The circle looks a lot smaller too. This flipper was an nos od green one before I plated it.


Check out the fiber plate, pre 38 plates were solid bake lite rather than a thin piece with a metal reinforcement. I guess these can be broken when the switch is locked, so HD changed them.

Check out how the wires go, this is perfecto!!!!!!!!!!!

shiny round stuff?

We got a big ol box of chrome plating from our buddy Pat today. There were a lot of parts for a 65 that we are doing in there as well as some knucklehead parts. Check out how the area by the pivot is un polished, this looks so cool it is just like the og levers!


Here is the dash for a 38 that we are working on. Check out how the lip that sits on the tank is wider that an early 38 or 36 and 37.



Here is a pic of all of the shiny stuff!




Jesse spent the day radiusing new studs for cases. The beauty is in the details that nobody seems to notice lol.

fin repair

Here is a large port head for a fellow in sweden. There are some messed up fins on it.


Here you can see the most visible one after being built up. There is still one missing by the exhaust port.



Here it is all fixed up and ready for paint.

46 trans

My daddy finished up this 46 transmission, I had to put it in the chassis just to check it out. This is probably my favorite stage of building bikes. The guys that designed these bikes 75 years ago really had a firm grasp on aesthetics. I love knuckleheads and four speed transmissions!

Paging doctor Matt

My dad cut his finger today, luckily I took the emt course when I was 18. That was over six years ago, and I have forgotten quite a bit about what they taught us. We had a short meeting and decided that the old super glue trick was the way to go.


Not only is super glue a super adhesive, it is a super anesthetic lol.



Here is my dad's finger all glued back together. I am going to have to print up new business cards that have "super glue finger repair" listed in the service section lol