Frame

Rake or not to rake???

If we run a bigger rear wheel, bigger rear tire, longer shocks, lower the front end 2", I think that will take away a couple of degrees of rake. This is far easier than cutting of the neck and re-angling it. Therefore, we will leave it, the neck, where it is... for now.

Got a couple of days in it though to cut off all the brackets, mounts and tabs that we don't require, this would be all of them. Sure we cut off 20 lbs or so of crap, much cleaner now. Welded on the seat mounts, done... for now.

Thinking we're going to be tipping the engine forward a little. this means we'll need to cut off the lower rear engine mount and re-weld it. This can't happen until we get the engine apart and back together and fit up the appropriate carbs. Rumor has it the carbs are a very tight fit to the down-tube.

Put Timken bearings in the neck, think we're going to try and bore the bores a little deeper next time the frame is near a Bridgeport. Don't like the way they project out of the bores. Everyone else seems okay with it, but think we'll fix that.

Got all new seals and steering stem nuts for the trees. New fasteners and a new leather pad for the dampener. Ordered up a new plastic knob and drawbar for the dampener set up. It is surprisingly effective at least in my garage at 0 mph. Don't think it'll be speed sensitive like a nice Ohlins unit, but I want to try it out since its such a visual period piece. Just made that up, (visual period piece), sounds made up but it is definitely retro.

Backend

Not much happening back there.
Wider 18" Excel rim with applicable Scorpion spooned on.
Stayed with the stock drum, as it'll likely be strong enough to lock when we're ready to go sideways.

Oh yeah failed to mention. My friends all kind of decided to build cheap dirt trackers so we could go out to our semi-local, up and coming dirt track north of the city. Cheap! f--k forgot that part. Now I have to learn to slide this thing with the added threat of dropping it when its worth more than my truck.

The aluminum swing arm is made in Thailand. I figured it was worth the risk. When I emailed to ask about fitting it to the XS, the guy said they shut down the shop for 5 days because Sepang is hosting the MotoGP. Can't be all that bad if they're hardcore MotoGP guys. It's a nice quality unit.

Anyways, all cleaned up, new shoes in there, all new bearings and hardware. New seals, axle, levers and custom wheel spacers. Added needle bearings and proper seals to the swingarm pivot. Not big huge dollars, another 1500 or so here, but nice light and tight.

Try to imagine a nice set of Ohlins on there as opposed to the ones shown. I promise, we'll do something about that soon.

Big Brake

So a good part of the reason I decided to spend so much money and time on rebuilding the front end rather than just buying an inverted solution off of Ebay (for a fraction of the price), was the cool front brake set up.

The stock disc carrier actually has two skinny little ball bearings of its own. It has its own hollow axle and is actually bolted to the front fork. I guess this was some sort of racing feature??? You could pull the axle and slip the wheel out leaving the brake caliper and disc still attached to the fork. So despite the fact that there will likely be a tiny bit of slop between the drive dogs on the disk and the hub of the wheel, there is a rubber insert which gets pinched in there, but likely it will still feel a little tiny bit squishy. Despite that, I thought the coolness of the set up was worth keeping. Duh...

So I picked up a used 03 R1 front caliper, the gold dot version. It's a left side so I can flip it over and mount it in the stock location in front of the leg. This also may do some weird things as the differential bore caliper will actually have the larger pistons leading, Yamaha intended it to be the opposite, but whatever, what do they know :). I think all their calipers are all equal bores now anyways. Oh yeah, you should make sure rebuild kits are readily available for your caliper before ripping out the old seals, 'cause I know that now.

Back to the disc. Now everyone knows a stock Ducati carrier will bolt to a stock XS rim and even the left side of the hub has a cover and under there is another bolt pattern that will bolt to a stock Duc carrier allowing for a low cost twin disc front setup. Simple! But as you have likely figured out by now, not a big fan of simple. Also, that is only applicable to the late XS's not the "early" ones.

So okay going to keep the stock carrier and chuck the stock disc.

This is promising. the carrier has a eight hole pattern, thinking I can make up a simple aluminum sub carrier, bolt it to the stock carrier and add a standard floating disc to the set up and be done. Trouble is try to find a eight button floating disk anywhere on the planet! Odd numbered buttons are all the rage.

So more intensive searching finds me a the door of a manufacturer in Sweden. ISR makes beautiful stuff. Guess what though... its not cheap, but he uses eight buttons on his disc. Guess the Swedes aren't as concerned about staggering the load??? So anyways figure while he is making the disc, might as well have him do the sub carrier as well. So we did up a quick SolidWorks design and sent it off to Sweden for a quote.

So for 2500 SED or... $500 ish dollars we are good to go.

A custom caliper bracket/adapter, all new bearings, seals, axle, all new fasteners and a Speigler brake line added in and we have a stupidly expensive 330 mm, not 320mm, front brake for our 40 year old bike. Now lets hope we have 2 finger stoppies, assuming we don't fold the little 34mm fork in half :).

Also, in case you haven't noticed the trend here, the picture above contains over 2000 of my hard earned dollars. this is Canada, and those are after tax dollars. So for you Americans out there thats like 3000 of your hard earned dollars, well close anyways.

Not the final hardware, might do a little pocketing on the bracket as well.

Like so.

Let the UPSing begin.

So UPS is becoming a daily visitor at the house now. It's like Christmas everyday for me.

Ebay seat showed up. It'll do. It's fiberglass, I have no sheet metal skills so I'll have to settle or bug Roger to make me a seat section. He's too busy anyways. So its here.

The super sexy Excel rims and Buchanan SS spokes showed, mmmmmmmmmmm nice stuff.
Another $1000.00 bill., Better not stop and add this up, getting scary and have barely scraped the surface of the money pit!

Early mock up.

Pirelli tires, refinished XS hubs, aluminum swingarm, cheap (temporary) Chinese shocks, all kind of balanced here to give us an idea of the future.

The Chinese shocks are awaiting a decent set of used Ohlins, as soon as I can find some. Just can't quite justify a new set at $1800.00 at least not t'til I ride it and see how bad the fork is.

Got some Vortex bars, grips, throttle assembly from an R1, master cyclinder off a ZX6 and clutch perch from the same. Gotta start thinking about cutting up the frame, front brake and engine stuff soon.

More Data

So, also finding out now that the skinny little fork isn't a 35mm fork like every other early fork on the planet, it happens to be a 34mm. That means springs n' seals may be harder to get than I thought.

Decided we like 256 engine internals despite their lack of availability. Have convinced myself through my half-assed research that we can still get a 750cc kit and the other good stuff we'll need to make my little 650 not so little anymore.

...really do need to look into this further at some point.


So pulled apart the front end today, lets see what we have here.
Need new tubes, light rust is much deeper than originally thought.
Saw tubes on MikeXS, ha! I'll go order me some of those cheap Chinese tubes... oops, don't have 34mm tubes, I'll look elsewhere. Oh oh, no tubes anywhere on the planet!!!!

More research/googling, don't know how we did anything before the Internet, so found some in Germany...

Thank You For Visiting Our Web Site.

A set of tubes for 1972 XS2 is $269.00; One tube is $135.00 

Priority Mail shipment is $48.00

Prepayment is necessary by International Bank Draft.

When I worked with my good friend Roger, we bought tubes from Forking by Frank. I'll find them again and give em a call. At least they'll be made right and also be made in the USA.

OK, so its like almost twice what we paid for the bike guess the fork rebuild might be a little more than we thought. Oh yeah, we want to shorten it a couple of inches as well, almost forgot. Guess what, no one does that to the "early" XS's. Starting to not like that word "early" with XS, it always seems to be followed by much higher prices than my web scanning had first indicated.

Anyways opened up the forks. No top out springs under the damper rod, so ordered some custom, (read $$$), wound springs to fit in there to pull the fork down a couple of inches, cool. Found some progressive wound springs somewhere, think Germany.

Anyways into the lathe they go, get rid of those cast in attachments all over them. Think I like the brake mounted on the front of the leg, different. Maybe some Yamaha R1 parts might work there.

Research, better late...

So... it's an XS2 not an XS650... ooops.
WTF, is this a good thing or bad????
Need more Google time.

Find Hugh on line. he seems to be the expert on all thing XS650, and a good guy.
He tells me the early XS's are cooler cause the cams bigger, rods are longer and something else I can't remember. So good thing...

More research confirms Hugh's knowledge.
256 engines are indeed longer roded, bigger wrist pinned and better cammed.

More googling leads me to MikesXS, appears to be a treasure trove of cheap, I mean inexpensive, XS stuff, this"ll be easy.

More time and research and I figure out the 256 engine stuff isn't quite as plentiful as thought and maybe even quite rare. MikesXS won't sell to Canada and the Canadian version of his site has no stock on much that we're going to need. The two Mikes XS sites seem to be in some sort of conflict... F--k!

Ok, so its a bad thing. Maybe I should have done a little research first, should have found a 447 engine, post '74.

So... make a decision, go find an earlier engine or stick with the 256. I really need more data.

Chuck everything

So figure we need what? The engine, engine mounts, tank, hubs and frame, hmmmmm anything else. Nope.
Wait, maybe that goofy front brake disc, skinny little fork and weak trees with the maybe cool, haven't decided yet, leather damper with big tension knob.

The rest of the stuff Cody and I took off looks like worthless crap. Chuck it all.

Second thought maybe keep the headers, might need the flanges or something.

Won't need so much, bars, controls, new carbs, saw those on MikesXS, only couple hundred bucks for some mikunis. Seat, shocks, wheels, still not much to get it going again.

Couple of other parts. Better get on Ebay and see what we can find.

Start with one...

Lay in bed Sunday morning. Convince self (and Tracy), that I (we) can afford the time and money to build a fun, cheap, cool little bike.
Do little to no actual research other than maybe one or two Google image searches.
Ask Frank to find me a slightly used XS650. He calls back in short order with a number for Paul.

$200.00, sight unseen, seems like a fair price for an "almost complete, no papers XS from some year or another", bike.


Convince 9 year old son to get up and go with me to pick up our new bike.

Cody, almost ready to ride. Have to find a spot for some passenger pegs :)

Start by removing all broken, rusted or unnecessary parts... or just remove all of them.