Exhaust Finale and Start of the Electrical

Had a nice long 4th weekend and got a lot done on the bike. The exhaust is fully welded and all welds ground smooth on Friday. The only things left are to find band clamps for the slip joints and to weld a hanger bracket to the frame where the 2" section starts.

The tape on the tail pipe is holding on an extra 6" piece of pipe to illustrate how long the muffler will be whenever I get around to ordering one, but its not cheap so I'm putting that off till later. The tape from the swing arm to the wheel is in place of the brake stay bar that I also haven't fab'd up yet, but that will be an easy addition when I get to it.

On Saturday I took the time to wire up the ignition module to a battery I had laying around. After an annoying series of minor oversights (forgot ground wire to the block, open fuel petcock), I was able to get it fired up without even using the choke. This video probably doesn't work too, I need to find out whats going on there...

Sunday I jumped right into starting the wiring. Didn't spend a whole lot of time but still made some progress. I drew up the entire schematic for the bike and how I want to wire it. 

Next I sat with the manual, the left and right controls (headlights, blinkers, ON/OFF, etc), and I re-pinned them into Molex connectors. I was able to remove about 4 wires from the controls by doing it this way because the original equipment harness had extra functionality that I won't be using; like a starter (haha) and a "blinker canceling unit" which doesn't work very well from what I hear. So at this point all of the controls up front and headlight are wired, now I just need to get some cable wrapping to harness the wires together and start on the rear part of the electronics. This includes the capacitor that will be replacing a battery, fuse panel, LED blinker timer, and brake light relay. The regulator/rectifier needs to be terminated and the alternator wires have to be redone as well. 

Exhaust Part 3:

I finally got everything planned out in my head for the next section of exhaust and it came out pretty good. The next section will be a slip fit onto both tubes that come down the front. This will make removing from the bike possible for things like an oil change. Also if I made it one piece, it would literally never come off the way I have it wrapped around the frame (I did a test piece first with the old exhaust). 

So after making the two sections that turn back under the engine, which was pretty intensive to make them even in every direction and length, I worked on the slip fit merge section. From here I have two pieces of pre-fab tubing that was stretched on one end to fit over the 1.5" tubing, cut to length, then  cut a taper that I used CAD to help me determine the length, angle, and depth to cut. This was very important not only for angle, but at the end where the two pieces are merged they have to match up with the circumference of a 2" piece of tubing that will exit out the right side of the bike next to the rear wheel. 

After carefully squishing the 2" tubing in a vice, the ends line up pretty well and after some more massaging they will be welded up. More to come later as I finish the last section.