No Rest For The Wicked

Added on Monday, December 1st, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor

You know the score, it’s Sunday morning and you just want to stay in bed – not a chance – the show opened at 10am and we were poised to hit the stopwatch after fighting our way through the huge crowds of visitors making an early start to spend a full day at the show; there is just so much to see and do here, I reckon you need two full days to do it properly and see every stand. It took us nearly half an hour just to get through the crowds and across hall 1 for lunch on Saturday – who said the bike industry is in decline, we can’t see it.

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Now that the Santee style hardtail frame is looking sweet; we have to fabricate the rear seat mount and oil tank mount as one unit. The seat is a classic sprung type for an authentic 50’s style, which will offer enough travel to soak up the worst of the British potholes, this is not a show bike remember, and we will expect it to do some serious miles. The hand made custom oil tank is then offered up in to position; this will also hide the battery and major electrics away from view for a clean uncluttered look.

Next to start preparing the petrol tank, we’re working with a stock Sportster tank which will be stretched and widened, the stock tunnel will be used to save time. The grinder kicks sparks across the build area, much to the amusement of our growing audience, as I remove the old candy red paint in preparation for cutting. The next stage in the tank fabrication is to cut half an inch either side of the filler neck and tunnel and then weld in a two inch section of 16 gauge steel on both sides to achieve a four inch increase in width overall.

Whilst this is going on we have to start building the wheels, these are chrome spoke wheels on 16 inch rims, lacing the spokes takes a fair bit of time as each spoke must be tightened correctly to ensure the rim runs true on the hub; the wheels will be fitted with 500×16 vintage balloon tyres to fit with the classic styling.

All has gone well with the oil tank, and the mounts for the frame, so we can whip this back off and prepare it for paint along with the frame, all the welds have to be ground down nice and smooth along with any unsightly tabs created in the first part of the fabrication process. The paint can’t be done on site because of the fumes, so every thing will get driven to our workshop in Norwich, a skim of filler applied where required, primed, colour coated, baked in the paint oven and lacquered over night. Everything has to be back in the Carole Nash Construct build area by 9:30 Monday, any later and the NEC security won’t let us move stuff around the show halls and we’ll blow our deadline. We won’t get any sleep, but our paint maestro Jon Fox is poised and ready to go.

We’re a bit behind schedule and need to catch up over the next few days, but overall it’s all going well. Get a motorcycle quote and win this bike, click here*.