More Catching Up

Ok, here we go. I'm trying to catch up and bring you up to date on where I actually am on the bike. If you'll notice, all three blog entries so far have been done on the same day in January. I've been playing around with the Triumph in fits and starts since I brought it home in the middle of last June. I decided to do a blog after watching my friend Rob chronicle the amazing rebuild of his 1958 Airstream trailer. I thought I'd do a blog to keep some of my motorcycle buddies abreast of my work. By the way, check out Rob's blog at http://www.sweetsovereign.blogspot.com/.

In these pics you can start to get a feel for what the bike is going to look like. I've got the fender where I want, the seat is mounted, the gas tank is mounted and secure. Things were going along nice and smoothly until I decided to stick the exhaust on and see how it fit. Well, it didn't fit. I'm going to run forward controls on this bike, and they are directly in the way of the normal exhaust routing. After a couple of days of playing around with the 2 sets of pipes I had laying around, sticking them on, under, around, and over in every conceivable direction, I finally settled on a pipe routing that I thought might work. I made them cross in front of the motor, out far enough away that they would not bother with the foot controls, then they came back and tucked in along side the lower frame rails for a nice tight look. I think it came out pretty nice, especially when you figure I made all the cuts by basically guessing where on the bend to cut and where to weld in a tighter or wider radius. I'm planing to wrap the exhaust with fiberglass heat tape, because I think it looks cool, but mostly because I'm not the best welder and a heat wrap will cover up my seagull poop welds quite nicely.