My Dart’s Reflection [1]

It’s been a fairly productive few days on the bike and head projects. So much so that here I am, writing the third update in as many weeks. My old English teacher at school would wonder what on earth was going on, as I was famously incapable of writing more than about three sentences every month when I was at school. And even then it was under duress. But one thing that I’ve found about writing, particularly about my head, is that it forces me to think carefully of the words I choose to convey my feelings. And this act of searching for words actually forces me to think more analytically about what it is that’s going on up there. A lot of those words never make it to these pages, but the act of constructing the phrase in my head is, for me, therapeutic.

And of course, now that we’ve spoken about careful and considered use of language, it goes without saying that this exciting instalment will be mainly pictures. I mentioned last time out that I’d tried to reuse the old Morini mirrors with limited success, but I wanted to do something that was at least usable. Of course, I could have looked around for a pair of mirrors with the same 61mm distance between the mounting bolts as I’m sure that Morini didn’t just magic that number out of thin air. But as already discussed last time around, I’d rather reuse what I had. Let’s take a look at what we started with:

First obvious problem is that it’s horribly out of focus, but once you get past the idiot with the camera you can start to see what’s going on there. The lower of the two mounting bosses had snapped off completely, and I’d potted the area with some epoxy to give it some strength. There is also a crack right around the mount – it actually came to me in two parts. I’ve glued it back together here, but it was obvious that it would fail again as soon as I tightened it down on anything other than a totally flat surface. Job one then, was to fabricate that flat surface out of something easy to work with. A lump of 5mm aluminium plate was chosen on the grounds that it was cheap. Right then – first item on the agenda was to take the bit of old number plate that I hacked up last time, and mark it out on the plate.

I was using an old Sharpie to mark it out, so the lines are about 3mm wide. This gives me plenty of material to work with. The initial cutting was done with the trusty old hacksaw, and then some very rough shaping on the belt sander just to knock the corners off:

Here you can see the template, the first hacked out blank, and the very roughly shaped version with the corners knocked off. Next step was to drill out the mounting holes – the reason for doing this now rather than at the end will soon become apparent. Firstly the centre of the hole was punched, and then off to the wobbly old pillar drill, taking the hole out to 6mm in a series of small steps:

I was pleased to find that I got the holes smack on the right centres to bolt the template to the blank. I could then take the shape down to a gnats gnadger of final dimensions on the belt sander:

Once I’d got down to about half a mil from all edges, I got to work with files to bring the thing down to final size, and leave a nice finish on the visible edges. And here’s one of the plates in situ:

And that’s a job that’s good enough I reckon. The mirror, as you can see is discoloured and cracked and has seen many a mile. And that’s brilliant, as now it’s going to see a whole load more. I’d love to do a quick “that’s no good, we need two” montage in a Bad Obsession Motorsport style, but I’m afraid I forgot to take a photo of both mounting plates. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the other mirror was given the same treatment.

Other than the mirrors, I’ve done some patching up of mounting holes in the front fairing (I’ll spare you the pictures – it’s dull to do, so must be purgatory to look at photos of someone else saying “and here’s the first application of P40” etc. etc.), I’ve replaced a few of the rustier fairing bolts with some stainless ones from the spares pot, and in a frenzy of reckless application of superglue and old offcuts of plastic, I’ve bodged the seat catch so it actually secures the seat. I wasn’t going to bother with that last thing for a long time, as, well, it’s not as if I’m going to be putting an MOT on the thing and riding it. I mean, it’s nowhere near finished, right? There’s a million things to tidy up and make lovely, so I can enjoy this bike in my old age rather than just riding it around for the sake of it. Right?

I’ve got the MOT booked for Thursday.

I’ve learned recently, in dealing with trying to make things perfect for the future, I’d forgotten how to enjoy them in the present. I need to step back, and accept that ‘good enough’ is just that.

[1] Bit of an obscure one that – Yo La Tengo, in case you’re interested.