Really naked bike :]

Tank holders

At first I thought I was lucky and will not have to do anything with the front tank holders because they fitted perfectly. It turned out that in order to maintain an appropriate tank-frame line I have to lift the tank about 3cm, so I made a nice pair of mountings, which will also be used to hold some electric stuff.

Visualization

Made some serious progress recently. I finally managed to put the wheels together – I painted both rims, put on new bearings, new seals, new tube for the front wheel and tires of course. I also lowered the front suspension – in summary the front of the bike is now about 10 cm lower than originally. Now I have to slightly raise the front mountings of the fuel tank and modify the whole sub-frame. That will be a challenge, I’m excited.

Currently the bike looks like that:

And this is a future visualization:

Out of the blue

I have tens of things more important to do with the bike than this, so it’s not the most appropriate time to mount mirrors, but who cares. I accidentally found a pair of nice mirrors and a sudden idea bumped into my head on how I want to mount them. I got down to work and made a pair of holders. Came out great in my opinion – take a look:

Aluminum balls enabling mirror rotation were made of the remaining part of recently cut off ignition switch mounting – that’s what you call recycling :]

Aluminum shaping

Today I modified the steering top bridge. I needed room to place a new speedometer right between the clip-ons, so I decided to get rid of the ignition switch mounting. The new speedometer will probably be an Acewell :] and the ignition switch will be located on the left side of the bike, under the fuel tank.

Ignition button

Can You see a little blue spot in the middle of the picture below? This will be the new ignition button.

I also made a holder for this button:

Dominator project loading...(20%)

Front mix

Honda NX650 is an enduro bike, so originally it comes with a 21 inch front wheel. For my purpose it obviously had to be changed…

I dreamed about a new Excel rim, but I couldn’t afford it so I figured out a different solution and...bought a second rear wheel. The idea was simple – take an original hub from the front wheel, take an original rim from the second rear wheel and put it back together. Great job with mounting new spokes done by Paweł Król from Bielsko-Biała!

This way I now have 17 inch rims both on the front and on the back of the bike.

Damn dirty spokes

Uff…finally finished.

My budget is tight, so instead of replacing old, dirty, rusted spokes from the rear wheel with new ones I decided to try and clean them. There are 32 spokes in a wheel. Cleaning and polishing one spoke took me about one hour. You do the math. 

A month spent on working with the spokes really taught me the definition of persistence. I thought it would never be over. And there is a lesson for the future – I’ll probably never do that job again – it takes too much time to get a satisfying effect.

But I’m finished and ready to go on! Stay updated :]

Clip-ons

I did some measurements, I did some web searching, and I found nice handlebars – a pair of 1994 Kawasaki ZX6 Ninja clip-ons. About 2 hours of work to fit each one and here’s the effect:

New fuel tank

I've spent some time searching for an appropriate fuel tank and finally I bought a pretty nice Kawasaki KZ750 tank. I wasn't expecting it at all, but it turned out that the front mounts fit perfectly :] Now I only need to fabricate a rear mount, get rid of the rest of the paint, apply some graphics and spray everything with a transparent lacquer. I'm psyched!

Here is the tank as it looks now:

Stage 1

The first stage of the project was taking all the useless parts off the bike:

Pretty much of the crap huh?

This was the easiest and the most pleasant part. Stripping is always fun :]

NX650 – There He Comes

After 2 months of searching, on the 19th of October 2011 I finally bought a base-bike. It was a 1991 Honda NX650 Dominator with a rebuilt motor from 1989 model (hopefully with a kickstarter). Visually it was terrible - dried, strong mixture of dirt, oil and grease was everywhere, rust was showing all-over, most plastic fairings were broken, the seat was ripped and every part was scratched  (the bike definitely had a tough off-road life) - but technically everything was fine. You can’t imagine how much fun I had riding it off-road for the first month compared to my Africa Twin :]


So this is how the bike looked like on the day of purchase:

Ready...steady...GO!

Yeap - the time has come to reveal my little dark corner in the digital world...

It's been a long time since I first started dreaming about building a custom motorcycle with my own hands...transferring visions from my head to the reality...creating something unique, exceptional. However, this was just a dream and it did seem impossible to be realized all that time - the main obstacles were lack of $$, lack of skills and lack of time (or was I just afraid of starting such a challenging project?). The year 2011 definitely was a year of significant changes in my life, at the same time though I realized there was a good chance to go with the flow and try changing an unreachable dream into a real goal. "F*ck that" - I thought - "when if not now?". The decision was made - I'm going to build a motorcycle! I dug through the Internet searching for a picture of one of my biggest inspirations:

and started planning the build. At first all my thoughts were very chaotic, but then little by little everything began to make sense.

The build is in progress and this blog was created as a way of documenting it's stages. I hope I got You interested, don't hesitate to visit my blog again :]