2 days in the garage

it was a very productive weekend in Vista. Nice to finally have a few days to work on the new bike. (well new as in I've had it for one week and its a 2001). A few tools that I swear have legs of there own, some phone calls to friends who have the answers, a saturday delivery package, removing bits and pieces and eventually everything, rewiring a new tailight and getting rid of emissions BS and I'm back on the road....

This is what I started with when I woke up Saturday morning. I had already changed out the bars it came with to some Biltwell Chumps that were cut down suuuuper narrow. Also I had pulled all the switches off the bars as well at this point.

and here's the same bike but with the following changes on Sunday at around 2PM:

Biltwell Risers in Cast Stainless

Biltwell Window Bars in Chrome

Biltwell Seat - Black Tuck n' Roll

Stock 2.2 Gallon tank from 1991 Sportster

Stock Black Fender chopped courtesy of Chris Brown

Sparto Tail light and license plate holder.

and of course my patented mess of wires until I rewire the starter and hi/low beam switches.

I still wasn't fully stoked on the stance, and most of that is due to the 12" shocks with the stock style fender. They just leave way too much of a gap between the tire and the fender. Even though this bike already has the 1" lowering kit on the rear of the swingarm that moves the shock mount bolts back, it still looked too high.

And here's where we're at after getting home from the first shakedown run to Encinitas and back.

A nice little stop to Chris's house turned into a few hours of just pulling shit out of this bike, like breather cables, stock petcock, and then replacing the stock 12" shocks with some Biltwell 10" struts and I was headed back home. I always swore against struts on a swingarm bike, but after riding 15 miles they honestly feel just like my old 10" skullman shocks that I was running on my previous bike.

Things to do next:

Biltwell Pipe Kit to make some sweet custom pipes

New Skullman or Licks 10" shocks

Order a West Eagle Thin Long solo seat pan - I miss that seat.

Mount the double stripe whitewall Dunlop tire I scored at the swap meet for 20 bucks.

Frisco Mount the tank like it was on the other sportster potentially

Rewire and move switches and ignition

Remove the riveted points cover and replace with Bench Mark cover.