The "Low Slinger" Pops its First Wheelie

This morning marked the end of my four say stint on night shifts.  I got home at 7am and not wanting to sleep the whole day away like I did the last time I came off nights I set the alarm for noon and planned on redeeming myself from the botched attempt to pull the headlight brackets off the forks earlier in the week.

So I headed to the local hardware store to get a new 5' length of 3/4" threaded galvanized pipe and two 18" lengths of 3/4" threaded galvanized pipe and couple end caps that had gone missing at some point in the years I have moved my bike hoist around.  After getting the whole thing assembled this time, everything went to plan and I got the bike lifted off the ground with ease.

As you can see below the hoist when properly assembled sturdily holds up the GS quite well, it also does a good job with my SV650 and after a buddy of mine who built his own after seeing mine was able to lift his entire ZX10R off the ground with mine at the front and his at the back.  They are quite useful for suspension work and I've also used mine for when I need to replace steering stem bearings or pull the triple trees.

A quick note here, always break the nuts on the triple trees before you lift the bike off the ground it makes thing much easier and safer.  Once I got the bike in the air I finished loosening the nuts on the triple trees ans with a little coaxing I was able to get the forks slid down enough to get the headlight brackets out, as well as that gaudy piece of plastic that "dresses up" the lower triple clamp.

It already feels cleaner I actually was thinking about keeping the stock signals they have a definite old school feel to them and I wouldn't need to spend any money on new turn signals then, Perhaps there is a way to customize them a little bit so they aren't so gaudy.  The front does look much cleaner without them!

One of the other things I really like about my bike hoist is how small it breaks down.  It hardly takes up any garage space when disassembled.

After I got everything cleaned up all that was left was to sit down and figure out how to re-bend the brackets so that the headlight will be straight as well as the turn signals.

The next step is to attend a garage beer session at my good friends place and get these bad boys bent back to the proper shape.  Once I get that done I will probably re-paint them a gloss black before I put them back on the bike.  That is probably all I will get done this weekend as I have some painting to do around the house but look for an update later next week!

The Best Laid Plans

Every once in a while you set out to get something done and it just doesn't work out the way you meant for it to.  Today I wanted to continue on with the headlight work I have been doing on the "Low Slinger" but things just didn't go as planned.  I wanted to use the bike hoist I had made many years ago to lift the front end of the bike off the ground enough to slide the fork tubes down so that I could get the headlight mounting brackets off of them.  They had obviously been quite bent in a crash at some point  in the bikes 31 years on this earth and I wanted to straighten them up so that the headlight was centered and the turn signals were straight.

The problem I ran into upon assembling my bike hoist is that I forgot that when I was last assembling it I accidentally over torqued one of the pipe joints and I twisted the threads off  of the pipes and it was stuck in the tee joint.  I had meant to replace the pipe and the tee joint before I would need the hoist again but that was years ago.

Undeterred I finished assembly without the missing right leg base and figured I'd give it a go and see if it would lift the front end.  I figured the chances of me dropping the bike were pretty slim.

It turns out that the chances of dropping the bike were slim, but so were the chances of the hoist actually holding up the bike!

So I spent what time I had carved out for working on the bike (not much since I am work 12 hr night shifts this week) using a hack saw and a chisel to cut out the threads that were stuck in the tee joint and hope that I could use the remaining threads on the pipe to complete the assembly of the hoist and get the job done.  Well it turns out that the remaining threads on the pipe weren't deep enough to engage the tee joint, at which point I disassembled the whole shebang and called the day a loss.

Isn't it funny how that works some times?  One little thing ends up throwing a wrench in your plans as I get older I find that a lot of the times (intentionally or not) that one thing is normally me!