sewing caddy outer carcass

OK, few more tentative steps towards a sewing caddy to put forth. now that the interior carriage is sort of done, it's time to build the "husk" that will nest directly outside of it. This involved rescussitation of a few old doug fir/redwood siding boards harvested from the throes of my rotting garage's rafters from an earlier post, jointed forth.

The vertical sides will be 9" tall so had to glue up a panel, making sure to note grain direction in the boards



One old trick about jointing mating surfaces is to fold them over and plane them thus:



glue-up and wait. wish I had more large mouth clamps to apply the pressure:



Now the tricky blocking out of the panels to length. That strut of wood interior to the xacto knife and outer carcass piece will be glued to the inside of the carcass and form the opposing cleat surface for the wedge which holds this entire piece together. Need to take it's width into consideration when measuring out the pieces and almost forgot this morning:



Chopping the tails for the carcass joints. Using a J. Krenov influenced layout where the tails are narrower towards the edges:



A lot of cautious sawing, and a few hours later and every joint is chopped out and fitment is tested. Looking actually pretty okay for my level of accuracy. Next step is glue up

sewing caddy undercarriage

OK! spent some more time on the gutz of this assembly: the undercarriage for the sewing machine. This is just a simple frame of hard wood that the sewing machine will rest upon. I have no present intention to affix the frame to the sewing machine; its main purpose will be to be the interior support of a pair of lateral rods which hold the lower frame into the external "shell" cover. I'm sure this doesn't make any sense in words, but imagine a horizontal grove on the outside of the below frame, and an interior grove on the shell at the same place, and a long rod shoved down the middle to hold 'em together.

Anyway, the frame wood I saved from the happy destruction of an old lounge chair that Sarah had mercifully allowed me to architecturally reconfigure with my handy 10 pound hammer. we wanted it out of the house, and I wanted the material since it was made mostly of oak and maple. the maple seems okay, but punky in spots. The oak has a few worm holes but is harder than hell mostly. Had to rehone my POS 1/2" chisel a few times before I could punch it through these dovetail chops:



Testing fitment of the joints



How she rests right now

Ratka's Sewing Caddy Part 1

Here's the Sewing Machine, gorgeous old iron. Ratka wanted something to house it other than the janky veneered particle board desk that it was attached to:



I'm going to go for a sort of "lunch pail" assembly. I'll make an undercarriage which will support the sewing machine from the underside of it's perimeter frame. This carriage will then have a sort of cleat which will connect to the exterior "shell". I have not diagrammed this well below, but should be apparent in later posts!





Job starts with wood, and I'm using some old panels that were up in the rafters of the garage when we bought the place. Really beautiful wood. Tight, tight grain, probably fir, but it could be redwood, I don't know. The key is how fine the rings are, which to me says: "Old" and Old Wood Is Beautiful:



My "Table Saw" is kind of Barbaric, but get's me close, and I thank my mate Peter Sutherland for hooking me up with an extra circular saw for the job!



Typical of wood siding, it has a bit of a cup to it so you plane out the bowed side, before you flatten out the cup here:



The tight tight grain of this wood made planing a real joy. I'm used to old, salvaged wood being kind of temperamental, and prone to tear out, but this behaved really nicely. The 14" Jack Plane from Lee Valley helps

Trailtech Install, Part 22

Cruised around the internet forums for clues on how RFVC impaired riders mount the thermometer to their engines. One idea is to place the sensor right where the oil line feeds into the cylinder head. I replaced the Alu washer proximal to the rockerbox cover. I don't think the pressures are great enough through that banjo bolt to cause much blood loss, so hopefully it will be okay. I've got the bolt backed out right now just to illustrate how it goes together here:



Tacho wire was simple enough, just wrap the busy end five times around the spark plug lead, and ground into the nearest convenient earth circuit, which for me was easiest done via that posilock tap up 'ere



One cannot underestimate the utility of having a cache of used inner tubes. 700x35c worked best to insulate my power switch terminals



And here it's all coming together

Installing the Trailtech computer

Pretty cool device, in theory. Polarity agnostic, so you don't have to worry too much about supply/ground issues. Their tech support said you do not even need to have a fuse on the supply side. I wish I understood why but when I touched the power leads to my battery, it all lit up just fine. Not that you absolutely need to have it hooked up to the bike's power circuit given the CR2032 battery that the unit will work with as well (albeit not as much illumination). Simple magnetic sender for front wheel, and all I have to do is wrap another wire around the spark plug lead to get revs...I fabbed up a little alu plate for mounting, included my ignition switch to be tidy:



The trailtech even comes with a thermometer and while I'd be eager to use it, the sensor takes the place of the crush washer for the spark plug. Any Honda RFVC thug will tell you how little elbow room there is in that zone...ah, the naughty parallels I could rattle off but wont...

Instrumentation? Who needs Instrumentation???!!!

Tachometer enemas afoot. Tried a VDO but it was a NO-GO. Stupid sensor pickup was made for a car (or a harley), but not a bike.

Buckled and went for a digital Trailtech; its ubiquity and ease of use should make this work okay. But, but, but, that means removing the existing sheet alu "dash" Banke cut for an analog instrument, and with it the ignition switch. So I had to figure out a way to handle the ignition-kill circuits, leading me bypass the use of a key and just use a simple on/off switch approach. I saw this application of a ubiquitous hardware store toggle switch on the wrenchmonkees website and decided that it was kind of my speed:



Mine's quite uglier, but within reach, handling lights-on, and KILL. The key ignition was kind of a joke anyway. one could have easily cross wired the bike and made off with it. The only real test of security is whether a person could actually kickstart the temperamental engine:





For now? No instruments, and who needs em? I'm not raising hell on the highways. I'm putzing around in the hills and if someone asks, i'll just say it's about as fast as i want.

Ran out of gas today, tho. Felt the engine hiccuping at the top of grizzly peak, so luckily, just a long coast down the hill for a few lumps of petrol. I guess an odo would be helpful...

Here's a wiring diagram from a previous post on how the kill/ignition circuits look.

More Tacho Fail

I give up. Not sure how I could have fried the refurb tacho like this; wish I could have taken a photo of its guts before returning way back when I initially had a problem -- I'm betting those burn scars were always there. Can't imagine that I fried it a second time on install. Much ado about nothing. Guess I should just go looking for a VDO.

From their Tech Support

Hi Adam,

Sorry for all the troubles we are having here. We got the tacho back. It has blown the internal fuse again. Unfortunately it appears to have got some heat into it before it went. I have attached a picture of the board. When we went to replace the fuse the part on the circuit board it solders to came off, form the heat. Unfortunately there is no repair for this. I the picture this is the area in front of the harness plug right side.

As far as the gauge we sent that somebody stole from you mail. Not sure what to do there as cant really blame you for that.

Kind Regards,
Dan