The Motorcycle Page The back of Jon's bike


When I first moved here I did all my commuting via bicycle, but because it's sometimes useful to get around a little faster I also have a motorcycle (34k jpg). I bought it from my friend Tom as a sort of motorcycle kit for $1. It had spent a fairly harsh Pittsburgh winter sitting in a lot of little pieces in our car port, and it needed a lot of attention. Mark and I put it back together, and so far I've put over 3,000 miles on it without any problems.

Mark's motorcycle is a nice BMW motorcycle (51k jpeg) which he's done a lot of work on, and is quite lovely at this point. One of the neatest things that he's done was a modification of the bar-end mirror mounts. The original scheme involved squeezing a rubber flange so that it would expand and grip the inside of the handlebars. This setup has the problem that over time the mirrors would sag a little bit, and need readjustment. Mark welded/machined a pair of split tube segments similar the the mounting scheme used in bicycle seat stems. Very beet, and very sturdy.

Jon got his motorcycle for a whopping $100 and it's needed quite a bit of work. So far we've worked on the wiring, and replaced the clutch cable. We also cast a new clutch lever. We rammed up the original clutch lever (24k jpeg), and coped down to the parting line. It came out rather well I thought (28k jpeg). After a lot of chrome polish the whole bike is starting to look respectable. (Although we never even found a speck of chrome on that exhaust system.) Here's a view from the front (50k jpeg), and the side (52k jpeg).

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