Just realized I haven't uploaded a photo of the old 1965 Yamaha 250 Big Bear yet.

This is all I have to show right now, but plan on taking some better shots this weekend if the weather is nice.

progress on the gas tank

most of you might have noticed I haven't been posting to many ride reports lately. It's mainly because I had some issues with my gas tank. One of the welds seemed to have formed a crack from all the abuse I put it through riding off road and the two times it's been down. Took it to my father in laws and we did a quick weld job on it that will hopefully fix the issue. Now all I need is to finish up the paint. Today I started on laying down some coats of primer and thought I'd take a couple photos to share. First photo I'm putting up just because I think it looks funny because it looks like the tank is floating.

Floating tank


The second photo is a shot of the setup, I went to the hardware store and got two 2x4's 8 feet long and had them go ahead and cut them at six feet. And I had two extra 2x4's that were 4 foot already. I screwed the 4 foot one to the top of the two six footers, then screwed on the two feet using the 2 foot long 2x4's. I used a couple scrap pieces of 2x4's to hold the bottom 4 foot long board in place and screwed it on for extra support, I then tied fishing line around the top and then through the two bolts on the back of the tank. I'm not real comfortable with the fishing line right now, so soon as the primer dries I'm cutting it down and running some 40lb cords I have, but for now I've laid a few camping mats under the tank to break the fall just in case the fishing lines fail.

setup

Restoring the old Yamaha YDS3

Been spending time scrapping about 40+ years of mud off of the recent 65 big bear that I purchased from craigslist. I'm about ready to start getting some work done to it. Been making a list of parts that I need and prioritizing them. First on the list is new rims, front and back. Found some decent ones on ebay, but also got an email from someone letting me know where another big bear is close to me, so going to give him a call before I order anything. Hopefully I'll get enough done soon to take some new pics and will keep all of you updated.

Thought I'd go ahead and share an awesome chart I recently found when checking prices for the tires for the project. The front tire size is 3.0/18 but trying to find that tire size has proven to be hard since most places sale them in metric sizes. So I found the chart that will convert the size over for you. Hopefully some can find this chart helpful.
http://www.webbikeworld.com/Motorcycle-tires/tire-data.htm

happy building to any one out there restoring bikes, if so feel free to send me pictures of your projects and some information and I will share them on bikerblogger if you'd like

installed the new fairings

Finally got my fairings on the bike, had a few hours of no rain, took me under 2 hours from start to finish with filming and taking pictures. Just putting them on should take about an hour. But here's the progress photos, videos coming soon.

(for some reason my blog is having problems with gifs, so click the link to see the gif.)
Fairings photo

the motorcycle fairings were purchased through http://www.motorcyclefairingsource.com/

time to work on my winter projects

Now's the time to start working on a few of my winter projects now that the semester is over. To bad it seems to rain every day, and looks like rain for the next few days, so I guess I need to clean my garage and make a little extra room to be able to complete the projects inside. Already started putting on the new fairings, but had to stop due to rain again. Planning on building a work table in the garage which should open up a little extra room for me to work. So come back and look for some pictures soon of my work area, along with some how to videos.

New fairings

Been slacking on the blog lately, my finals are coming up for my classes and I've been spending most of my time studying. Soon as the semester is over I'll have a few stories to post up. But I wanted to go ahead and take a second to post up a photo of my new fairings that I just got in. I ordered them from recently from www.motorcyclefairingssource been needing to replace my plastics for a while now and finally decided on a set, so far I'm really impressed with the quality, paint, and service that I got from them. Soon as I can get everything finished with school I'll take some install pictures and probably even a video with a full review of the plastics. But for now here's a photo of how they look.

Sad day

It's a sad day in the motorcycle racing world, Marco Simoncelli has passed away from injuries that he got from a wreck during the 2nd lap of Malaysian MotoGP at Sepang. Anyone that watched the race knew it was going to be bad when it happen :(