Good Weekend

Interesting weather of late. We got some snow and cold last week. It was 22 when I came home from work Friday evening. Saturday was sunny but still a little on the cold side. I don't know that it got above freezing but as long as you were in the sun, it didn't require much more than a hoodie to be comfortable. Sunday the temps got up into the fifties as it did last weekend. I took advantage of the nice weather and loaded up the Himalayan onto the new carrier and took it for a shake-down cruise on a couple of the back roads around the shack. Seems to work OK. I'll take it for another spin before heading to Indy, however.

I did a little rough layout work for the track racer project. My plan is to make the tail end of the frame rails and the nose ahead of time. When those are done I'll tack the frame rails together with some temporary cross members and make the motor mounts. At that point I can weld all the frame pieces together and put the suspension under it. I decided to split the original wishbone. I bought a kit from Speedway that was in the last post.

There's a couple of weld bosses and Ford tie rod ends in the kit and I also bought the plates for mounting the wishbone to the frame rails. I'm not going to try and build this thing as a strict replica but I want it to look like an "updated" original. Since it'll have disc brakes, that'll be a dead give-away that it's not an original but I'm hoping most of the rest of it will look as it would have way back when.

Surly and the grandsons came down Saturday. Surly bought himself a new pickup he wanted to show me and the one grandson wanted to check out the little midget racer I built years ago. He's way too tall for it now but we can stretch it to fit. Surly also wanted to discuss the old boat trailer he pawned off on me a few years back. I debated working on that before I built the bike carrier but it certainly won't hurt to have a little utility trailer around for us to use.

I've been doing pretty good at getting out into the shop most days for at least a couple of hours. Now that it's going to start warming up, I'm going to try and spend a bit more time out there. Lots of projects, need to keep at it. And while I've got plenty of things to work on of my own, I'm looking forward to working along side my boys.