24. SLAVERY

In the interests of being able to quickly arrest unintended forward progress I decided to upgrade to hydraulic anchors both front and rear.
The front we've already discussed but the drum rear is a very different kettle of fish.
Originally Mr Honda had fitted a rod operated drum actuated through a crossover shaft.That crossover shaft got deleted a while ago thus the move to hydraulics.
The master cylinder is already adapted so on to the slave cylinder which was originally meant for a Toyota clutch.
Decided to drill a couple of holes & bolt it to the drum backing plate.
It's a little big so in an effort to hide it in plain sight I wound up filing the part numbers off then polishing it to match the, now floating, torque arm.

Toyota clutch slave cylinder as bought

Slave polished up

slave on brakeplate

hydraulic rear brake setup

original Honda setup

23.WHERE WE'RE @...

Pulled her outside for the 1st time today to stand back & evaluate her proportions & stance.

CX500 custom rebuild progress

CX500 custom rebuild progress 2

22. MOUNTING THE GUARD PT.2

To carry on I decided to add a couple of rearward facing braces & incorporate x6 rivnuts then weld on a pair of spacers to help brace everything up nicely.

Setting the rivnuts

Mudguard mount test fitting

Painting completed mudguard mounts

21. MOUNTING THE GUARD

Decided to use up an old Moto Guzzi Sport 1100 carbon front mudguard (second grade) that had I had been tripping over for years.
First I taped on a piece of 25mm diameter plastic hose then placed the guard on & made a quick sketch.
Marked that out on to a bit of 20mm mild steel strap, pilot drilled the holes to m5 then using an m6 tap threaded those holes.
Stuffed x4 rubber grommets into the guard then bolted her up.
May need to fab a brace just yet,will see how it goes.

Hose guide for mounting front guard

Guard mount sketch

tapping guard mount to m6

Guard test fitting

Carbon front guard done

20. GENESIS 1:3

And God said "Let there be light" and there was light and God saw the light and it was good.
Well, not bad anyway. Got an old fashioned round  8" 35w Q/H headlight with built in indicators. Not the brightest light in the shed but good enough for this guy. The blunt end got a slimline tail/stoplight mounted in rubber grommets on a fabbed stainless steel bracket 'glassed in underneath.At this stage am undecided on the indicators.

Tail light/#plate pattern

Tail light bracket glassed in + seat rubbers

Tail light/#plate bracket completed

Headlight & Tail light

19. TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE?

As I'm 5'15" tall the chances of me getting down behind the fairing screen to peer thru it are slim to non existant. So decided to make me a nice carbon fibre windscreen. This will match the carbon fibre front & rear mudguards.
Added some m5 stainless button head capscrews and will end up clear coating  all the carbon bits later on.Its this clearcoat that helps give carbon bits that deep gloss.

Carbon screen

Carbon screen 2

18. MEAT OR POTATOES?

Induction

Well carbs of course! Having decided that the standard CV carbs wont play nice with pod filters & arent worth it anyway time for plan A. A pair of Makuni VM34's have arrived so I set about figuring out how to mount them? Turns out silicone bends are available in many sizes bends etc so in this case I'll be using a pair of 76mm long 30 degree bent 45mm to 38mm id reducers.
Had to remove the stock rubbers from the alloy manifolds first  which turned out to be a mission in itself as they are very firmly glued on. Air filtration will be via lightly oiled 58mm I'd foam pods.Ill make my own throttle cables probably also using a 2 into1 adapter. Have been searching the interwebs & have found a baseline jetting chart so am almost there.

17. INSTRUMENTAL

Decided to ditch the original fugly clocks in favour of one of those new fangled digital setups.

Once more with the cardboard template this time on to a nice piece of stainless steel sheet.

Instrument bracket

 Added 3x rubber grommets in an attempt to dampen any errant vibes

Digital instrumentation

  Have also decided to omit the ignition switch, as I'm forever misplacing my keys, in favour of a battery cut out switch that got mounted in the now upside down headlight shell.

Cockpit

16. MORE SHINY BITS

The front disc rotor is made of stainless steel but looks a bit shabby so thought I let's polish it up. After a quick paint strip several hours elapsed on my long suffering Ryobi polisher to reveal a slightly shinier part.My advice to all is,unless you have a lot of both time & patience,dont bother.

Witness:

Disc as was

 paint stripping disc

Polishing disc

Disc after polishing

15. B4's,DURINGS & AFTERS

Here's how I made the caliper spacer.

First grab some  thin corrugated cardboard, I like to use pizza boxes,( and eat pizzas) then make best guess patterns.Usually the 3rd or 4th version is close enough.Trace it on to,in this case 1/4" mild steel plate, & proceed to cut it out.Both my Ryobi 18v jigsaw & angle grinder worked very well.

Caliper mount pattern

making caliper adapter plate

The plate was cut out in 2 halves that then got some electric glueing to form the offset needed, a further grinding /smoothing then a coat of 'Zinc It' stainless steel spray. Job done.

Finished caliper adapter plate

Here's what all that fuss was about:

Original front end

Upgraded front end

14. FURTHER RETARDATION

The '78 CX's standard,ie small 240mm diameter,front brake rotors with their single pot calipers are certainly showing their age so it's time for an upgrade.
Turns out that Honda's '82 CB650 Custom came out with an almost  300mm rotor which just happens to bolt right up.
Couple that with an ex BMW K100 4 pot Brembo caliper & job done......well almost.
Two things holding up progress, the caliper has to be adapted to the Suzuki forks and the disc needs spacing away from the wheel.
But first of all the wheel bearings are 15mm I.d. but the Moto Guzzi  axle needs ones of 20mm I.d.
Luckily I had a spare set so time to fire up the heat gun again then to 'drift' (which is a euphemism for smack the hell out of) ,them out.

Wheel bearing removal

New Guzzi bearings

making disc spacer

disc spacer

BMW caliper CB650C disc

That done it was once more to the lathe to turn up a couple of ali axle spacers & a  stainless steel spacer plate for the disc.

13. FLOATING THE ANCHOR

Brake plate in 4 jaw chuck

Being a fan of fully floating rear brakes ,that are a usual feature of my project bikes, I set about doing just that.

Boring out the  brakeplate

Starting with a turned up spacer and an embiggerated hole in the brake plate all I then needed was a suitable linkage/torquearm and mountage bracket.
Using 2x m12 rod ends,or heim joints as some people call them, and a length of m12 threaded rod covered with a stainless steel tube I soon discovered that it intersected with the swingarm brace.Thus running it under the swingarm was a no go. So i played around a bit only to run it up & over the swingarm instead.Fabbed up a nice pivot from an angle iron offcut then electric glued it to the frame. The arm was going to be powder coated the same color as the frame but as the old hotrodder axiom goes of "if you cant hide it make a feature of it" it's now polished up bright & shiny,loud and proud.

drilling the mounting bracket

Rear brake linkage

The idea is to form a parallelogram which will serve to negate rise or dive under brakes ie separate the braking action from loading up the suspension & thus no skidding or wheel hop when hard on the anchors.

12. SEATBUILDING 101

Next on the list is the solo seatbase.
Pix are worth 1000 words so here goes:

Mask off all the holey bits and anything you dont want covered in figlass

I like to use brown packaging tape,a hot glue gun and pizza box cardboard (any excuse to buy Dominos). Then she gets a coat of mold release wax

Here I'm using polyester resin with some black pigment & 300gsm chopped strand matt.This is were things get messy,smelly and sticky

After an overnight cure ya whip it off and trim the edges.I prefer to use my Ryobi cordless angle grinder with a 1mm metal cutting disc for this.Also drill some vent holes.

Now is the time to add captive nuts & any other fittings.

Now it's time for the fun part. I use  the middle grade of the reconstituted foam that Para Rubber stocks.

An electric bread knife will come in very handy about now.

Ados F2 contact adhesive is the go for stickage.

Using a rubberized trailbike seatcover from AliExpress turned back to front,removed the label and after a bit of grunting & turning the air blue with expletives such as "oh gosh" "darnit" "bother" & other words starting with F & C I finally got it done.To make sure it stays put use bighead ali rivets all round.

HERE ENDETH THE SURMON!

11. FABBED FAIRING FITTINGS

The time has come to attempt to fit the frame mount 1/2 fairing & headlight.This can be rather time consuming so these days i make the front mounting both telescopic and pivoting. This speeds up the whole process. Once the fairing is finally positioned I just weld everything solid.I also added a pair of steering stops. Generally I aim to keep all this just behind the front axle line as if it's too far forward it ends up looking all awkward.

Telescoping hinged fairing mount

Mount welded solid

Finished mount inc steering stops