To celebrate, I made some serious progress on the bike today. One of the things holding me back was the fact that I didn't have the tool to properly torque the stem nut. The reason I didn't have it is that Suzuki, for some reason unknown to me, charges $170 for the tool, which looks like this.
Normally I'd just take a brass drift and tighten it with a hammer but because this is part of the steering and having proper torque could be important, I decided to do it the right way. To this end, I decided to make my own steering stem socket.
First I bought a 32mm deep socket and wrapped it in tape.
Then I marked where I needed to remove material.
Then I turned it in a lathe to remove excess material from the inside.
Then I took a dremel to it to cut out the notches.
And then cleaned up the edges with a grinding wheel.
And I was good to go!
Next in my day of fabrication, I needed to make a brake caliper spacer, as my forks were missing one when they arrived. Searching fo some scrap aluminum, I cut off the end of my old bent clipon.
And this was the end result, accurate to 5 thousandths of an inch. The one I made is on the left, with the original on the right.
This allowed me to start buttoning up the front end. This is gonna look pretty good!
-W.W. SBSS
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