Workshop Blog February 2023

Well someone stole February. Can’t believe that it disappeared so quickly!
Once again I have managed to do not a lot on the project bike. It’s not my fault, I’ve been dutiful daughter and looked after my mum after she had her knee replaced.
Pretty marvellous what modern medicine can do. I was more interested in how they made sure the leg was the same length as it used to be! And also if you had both knees done at the same time, could they make you a little taller?
That would be useful for me. At last I’d be able to flat foot on more motorcycles than just my aging Yamaha SRX. That's a fairly extreme way of solving the height issue, so instead, I spent some time tying to design a bike powered by a GS500 engine, but with a considerably lower seat height. A standard GS also has bolt on frame rails to facilitate engine removal. I really wanted to do without them, but that makes engine mounting points more tricky. Anyway, it’s still a work in progress, but this is what I’ve come up with so far…

Exact styling is still subject to change. Don’t really need the full seat as I wasn’t planning on adding pillion pegs. I may go for a more flat track style, but as much of the bike as possible has to be standard GS500 to keep the costs down.

The only bit of project work that did get done was a trial fit of the headlight / cowl / front indicators.

Can’t say that I actually like those indicators and their mounts, but as they also serve as the cowl mounts, they’ll do until I can come up with a better solution.

At least they work.

Yellow plastic headlight retaining ring will hopefully be replaced with a metal one, probably incorporating some kind of guard.

Maybe March will be a more productive month. Maybe…