Hello. My name is Luke Cook. I’m 18 years old from Illinois. I have posted on here before but much of what I had to show was crude and unfinished, The bike is now ride able and is my daily driver. This bike was given to me by my brother. When i got the bike it was almost totally stock (minus a lot of parts that were lost through the years I suppose.)
I hadn’t known too much about the building of motorcycles or gotten too far into the fabrication side of much of anything. This has been quite the learning experience, let me tell ya. I started looking at ideas online for what I wanted to do with the bike. I looked at many Iron Horse magazines as well. I realized that what really needed to happen was lowering and a hard tail. Those were my main goals.
I came up with the hard tail when I realized my budget was really tight for the build. Like really, really tight, I knew that it would be possible to make a nice hard tail myself but i was concerned with the lack of a truing type of stand. I didn’t want the rear wheel to be dog tracking or way out of line because i knew that was going to just really mess it all up.
So I found some black tubing in the attic of the garage I was using at the time and simply welded it to the slot for the rear suspension and brought it up to the base of the old frame section i had hacked earlier. I had the bike sitting on a tool box, which was about the right ride height that I had anticipated. I figured if I did it this way it would keep the original spec of the wheel and allow it to be true but also be a hard tail.
After the bulk of the work was done, I was given a sporty tank from a guy with a bunch of street bikes. (what was he gonna use it for anyways.) i made the seat pan from a street sign that was also in the garage. I cut a basic shape of a seat to fit my ass and the pounded it into shape and worked it nicely to fit just right. I used a Ford Ranger leaf spring to rig up a spring-ish seat stand.
It’s the one thing that people say would seem the worst, but it’s really not bad. I cut notches into it to weaken it up and ride a tad softer. The bike has electronic ignition so no points, but i had to figure out a place to put the ignition unit, so I found a large tomato juice can to put it in. At this point, I’m not exactly proud of the electrical. i would much rather it be cleaner.
I’m working on it. i mounted the reg/rec on the chain guard because I thought it looked nice there with the cooling fins and all, but lets face it. There really wasn’t any other convenient spot for it. The rear fender was hacked from the original just shorted up and welded to the swing arm and I put some stays on it to keep it from rattling off. the headlight is a 1950s fog light of some sort. It was given to me and i built a bracket to hold it in place, I believe off the horn mount.
I am running no front brake, and it works out fine, but in case there is anyone that has a drum front wheel assembly I will buy it. My email will be at the end. All in all the bike cost me 25$ to build. (told you it was a tight budget)
