Harley & Shop Class

I found an article at Bayou Renaissance Man  about the end of shop class - cites a Forbes article that's a couple of years old but worth a couple of minutes of your time if you haven't already read it. Also, if you go to the Bayou Renaissance Man blog, scroll down and read the article "Never Trust a Man Who Hasn't Been Punched in the Face". Something worth thinking about there.

Meanwhile on the home front:

I got the heads torqued down on the Sportster, did a rough adjustment on the valve lash, then hung the pipes on to see what was required, if anything, to finish those up. Came up with this:

This is the bracket and hardware to support the pipes. One bolt is coarse thread, one bolt is fine thread and one bolt is both. If you look close at the little shorty in the bottom right of the photo, you'll notice the top half is coarse thread and the bottom half is fine thread. This is the result of not taking shop class (or just plain ham-fistedness), in case anyone needed any further proof. You'll also notice that the spacer on one of the longer bolts is actually a couple of short spacers and some washers, rather than what is actually required. Just gotta love it.

However, sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. The rear cylinder head bolts are directly under the top frame tube so there's no straight shot with a wrench to torque them down. And as if that's not bad enough, the rocker box sticks out into the path a bit so you can't get a deep well socket on there, or a short one nicely either. I bought a cheapie 9/16" socket, chucked it up in the lathe, shortened it a bit and put a taper on it. Worked pretty good after that but I don't recommend trying to get accurate torque readings using a universal joint.

I still need to finish some work around the shack but I'll get the correct hardware gathered up for mounting the pipes and keep plugging away on the bike.

Today's World Vegetarian Day, so do like mom told you and eat your veggies today.