Jigsaw puzzle

Apart from some major staring, lots of small things have been happening over the past 2 weeks. I've been buying tube, chunks of aluminium and lathe tools and to add to that i recently made a rather cool discovery.

To elaborate - i bought lots of 1" seamless tube for construction of the back half of the frame, it's quite thin but there will be a lot of cross bracing which should give it good overall strength.
I couldn't decide whether to go for rectangular section tube with built in axle adjusters at the back end of the frame or to use bolt on aluminium axle adjuster blocks.
The advantage with the blocks is it's very easy to adjust ride height, but to buy or have them made is very expensive. The afore mentioned recent discovery however has swayed me and I've now decided to make my own.

The back wheel has been progressing too, i bought some great chunks of aluminium bar to create a new wheel centre from. It will be almost an identical copy of the current bopchop wheel, but bigger (apart from thinner hub and spokes) and wider rims. It's in the lathe at the moment where most of the £50 worth of bar is being turned into swarf.

The hub section or spoked bit was being a bit problematic, at 13" diameter it was too big to get in my lathe to turn and i could do with milling the spokes out too. I got some quotes for people to do it but it was working out too expensive to be worth it. Then i thought about CNC water jet cutting.... the hub - after all, is just a flat plate of ally cut out into a desired shape. So i set about looking for more information and places that do it and discovered a place just round the corner from where i work.

I emailed John who is MD at K Cut on White Lund in Morecambe and after sending a CAD drawing of my design he gave me a price and a day or two later it was done, and all for a price that was less than i could buy the ally for.

Water cutting uses a super high pressure (60,000psi) focused jet of water that travels at 3 times the speed of sound and will cut through almost anything. Controlled by computer it will simply follow the lines of a CAD drawing with great accuracy. The finish of the cut surface is similar to 240 grit sandpaper so isn't going to be difficult to polish, and the cuts are very clean indeed. I even had the bolt holes cut rather than drilling them and they are spot on.

John showed me other motorcycle parts he was making for people, he is happy to take on small jobs and the service is very good. I'll definitely be using them again... particularly for the axle adjuster blocks and probably several other parts too!