The Racing Motorcycle: Volume 2 - A Technical Guide For Constructors
This book is my personal bike building bible. It covers using steel, aluminium alloys and composite materials to produce both structural and non-structural parts for your bike. There’s information on frame, tank, bodywork and exhaust construction, and it’s written by someone who has extensive theoretical and practical experience. It’s a book about actually building bikes, with enough added engineering data to allow you to build something that should be safe without bogging you down in complicated mathematics.
What is this wondrous book?
The Racing Motorcycle: Volume 2.
A Technical Guide For Constructors by John Bradley
ISBN: 9780951292938
Don’t confuse this with the similarly titled Volume 1, that is a good book in it’s own right but deals more with the theory of motorcycle design rather than the actual nuts and bolts of building one.
The only downside to this book is the difficulty of finding a copy.
Keep pestering the publisher www.broadlandleisure.com and hopefully they will one day reprint or publish it in E-book form.
Update: 15/01/24
It seems that Broadland Leisure (or at least their website) are no longer in existence. Secondhand copies of this book are eyewateringly expensive but there does seem to be another option. A pdf of the book is currently available on SCRIBD. It's now a paid for service, but when I tried it there was the option of a free trial month. Download proved problem free, and although I can't claim to have checked every page, it looks complete.
Update: 15/01/24
It seems that Broadland Leisure (or at least their website) are no longer in existence. Secondhand copies of this book are eyewateringly expensive but there does seem to be another option. A pdf of the book is currently available on SCRIBD. It's now a paid for service, but when I tried it there was the option of a free trial month. Download proved problem free, and although I can't claim to have checked every page, it looks complete.