Breakdown

Broke down on the way to MOT. This is the problem with SORN'd vehicles - there's no opportunity to test-drive them before you actually drive them to the MOT station.

Anyway, what happened here was entirely my fault - it later dawned on me that I'd underfilled the cooling system because I didn't even look at the expansion tank and made no attempt to turn the engine over to eliminate air locks after filling.

No damage, only to my pride.

Rear fender and struts

Made some struts for the Honda today. Pretty pleased with the way they turned out. I used 8mm OD / 6mm ID stainless pipe and a Draper Mini Tube Pipe Bender which is supposedly only to be used with thin-wall copper plumbing pipe but it handled the 1mm wall stainless admirably. At each end of the pipes I created a flat piece in a vice and then drilled a hole through.

At the front-most end of the plastic fender (£15 off ebay) I fitted some aluminium cable straps originally destined for my Lambretta and used them to mount it to the swingarm.

Side-mount number plate

Managed to find the time to rig up the number plate on the side of the Honda.

I did this using an off-the-shelf all-in-one number plate/tail/brake light with holder which I chopped up a bit and mounted to the chain cover using stainless socket button screws with allen heads, with nylock nuts on the underside.

Forks refurbished

I rigged up a rather ridiculous trolley for the Honda to enable me to remove the forks and wheels with ease.

Having done this, I stripped the forks to replace the top seals and oil, and also chopped 50mm off the spacers to make it sit a little lower. While the trolley was in place I also took the opportunity to remove the rear wheel and get rid of the solid wheel covers.

As you can see here I still haven't chopped off the rear of the frame.

Fender gone

Removed all the rubbish from the back of the back - lights. saddle, bags, saddles, rear fender. All that remains is the metal subframe which I'll chop off at a later date.

Shed some weight and tat

First step with the Honda was to remove some bits that I don't want and put them on ebay.

Things like this crash bar:

And the solid wheel covers, sissy bar and other small odds and ends. I also binned the saddle bags, the rear fender, some tassles and eagles. In total I made over £100 and shaved several kilos off the weight.

Honda Shadow VT600 bobber project

I've bought a running but slightly neglected Honda Shadow VT600 with the intent of turning it into an old-skool bobber. When I bought it it looked like this:

And the plan is to strip it down and make it look a little more like this:

I don't have a garage so work on it will be weather-dependent, and with three young kids time isn't particularly abundant, so this is going to take some time.