Pressing Concerns

I finished the weld tester for the big Dake press at the college. They already had the bottom piece but the top of the "U" had a groove worn in it from testing coupons. I welded up the groove and ground it smooth. The lab tech who started on the job had made the angles the U shaped piece was sitting on so all I had to do there was weld the pieces together. I made the ram out of junk that was laying around. It works, so now we have a back-up tester and the radius on the ram is a little larger which will work well for bending heavy wall pipe coupons.

Seat bracket for the Sprint. It's just tacked together for test fitting but it'll be a simple matter to weld up. After it's welded and bolted up, I'll see if I need to strengthen it by boxing in the sides.

Fits good on the bike. There's a bit of necessary clearance between the seat and the tank and it follows the contour of the rear fender well. I need to look at the bracket for the "jiffy" stand. It appears to be hacked off. I know we came across at least one jiffy/kickstand when we were sorting parts. I can use that one for a pattern and make one up for this bike and put the other one on the Sprint Surly is planning to put together. 

I think I'll make an aluminum points cover for it also. I bought a finned one for the race bike but it fit rather poorly. Actually, I think it was intended for a Triumph. I made up a gizmo that I bolted the points cover to that would fit into a collet on the lathe so I could turn a relief on the back side so the points cover would fit in the side cover rather than just on it. I saw the fixture when we were sorting parts, so I'll dig that out and make a spiffy, one-off points cover one of these days. I need to make a bracket to hold the back of the gas tank down also. I'll see if I can find a little piece of stainless around here for that. I'm going to have to order in a blade for the bandsaw before I can make much of anything, however.

The weather is starting to act "Novemberish". Won't be long until the cold weather is upon us. Now that the wife is feeling better and I've got the shop pretty much ship-shape, I'm hoping to have a rather productive winter. I had a stress test and an echocardiogram recently. I go see the doc in a couple of weeks to discuss the results but they already called and said I was good on the stress test. A few minutes on a treadmill isn't any kind of stress compared to teaching high school kids for over thirty years. At this rate might actually live long enough to get all the bikes finished.