So, I’m currently distracted from the Bultakenstein project by another new toy, which I’ve nicknamed “Baby”…
…but once I get ‘er shimmed level and bolted down, clean off the cosmoline, get a dedicated circuit run, oil the bearings, and run-in the motor, I can start getting busy making countless mistakes. I also still need to buy a 4-jaw chuck and a drill chuck, which may have to wait a month or two. I am sure that in the long run, however, It will be a huge benefit to this project. Things should (eventually) progress faster and the quality of my fabrication should go up dramatically because of Baby.
Ultimately, this lathe pretty much puts an end to the whole experiment this project was intended to be — to see if you can build a motorcycle completely from scratch, super-cheaply, by using salvage parts and only basic hand tools. So perhaps I should go ahead and answer that question definitively right now: it’s probably possible, but utterly pointless. If you try to cobble worn out junk together into a motorcycle without investing in the proper resources, you will either 1) probably never finish it, or 2) end up with a worn-out, junky motorcycle not worth all that effort. The “bare-bones-everything” techniques I’ve been using require substantial time and manual handiwork to get even passably mediocre results — substantial enough that anybody who’s serious enough about this to see it through to completion is going to realize (as I have) that is simply more efficient to at some point throw some legitimate resources behind the effort. And if you want to make this a hobby — meaning you expect to undertake additional bike projects in the future — the return on equipping yourself with real shop equipment and precision machine tools is too great NOT to invest in.
So, I am casting off my budgetary constraints. This will still be a spare time, spare cash project, but I am no longer going to see how cheaply it can be completed. It would have been a great human interest story for internet spectators, but I don’t want to end up with a good story. I want to end up with a good motorcycle.
