Chabott Inspiration

After seeing the work and designing that Shinya Kamura has been doing to his BMW project, I  felt inspired.  I'm intrigued with his use of a K100 fork setup and look forward to seeing how he gets on with the brakes and his choice of wheels. Maybe it'll be something I'll try as well, as the K forks have better rigidity. However, they've always seemed to be a bit chunky compared to the rest of a airhead chassis.  One of the things that was fun to use on my hot rod project were broken fork caps. In which the broken edges are machined off cleaning up what is left.  Being very thin and soft these caps damage easily when not removed with the proper pin tool.  Not very good for a restoration but great to modify for lightness.

 Here are three caps;  the first one has been broken at the threads but would have been a good stock cap. The small cap is one that the whole edge has been machined off, much that same way it is on the hot rod.The one in the middle is something new.  When experimenting with a easy way to remove the broken sections for final machining I found that it had a rather cool design after being cut with the lathe.  A little more playing with a rotary table in the drill press and presto, a cafe styled cap!

And before you know it-  the fun is done.  Time to move on to other projects.  So I've set the 1964 R60/2 onto the bench and into plain sight to begin the process of gathering parts-  making lists and in general getting on with it. A plus is that it keeps the Beeza company.