Decisions, decisions.
They take up a lot of my available building time. Since there are two sets of parts that i can choose from i decided
that it might be a good idea to position some items on the frame in order to dicide which parts to use. That however didn't help
me a bit. So I decided to post the pictures on the Dutch forum for owners of Russian motorcycles.
First the tank was evaluated. Not minding the quality of the paint and stuff the choise was between the '58 tank:
And the 68 model:
The 58 model won the competition, and I was glad it did. Somehow the older the parts, the better the looks.
Next decision was which seat to use. An original Russian IZH seat:
Or an old German Pagusa seat from a BMW:
On this item not only the looks counted, but comfort was an issue as well. Therefore I placed both seats on a frame and
sat on them for a while. First in line was the Russian seat. I decided that Russian people must hate comfort! The steel
rim on the backside of the seat forced one to sit more to the front of the seat. At the front however a petruding bulb
threatens ones familyjewels to be crushed at the first bump in the road
. After two beers my arse cramped up, so I mounted the
Pagusa to the frame and sat down...Wow, German quality!! This is the seat I'm gonna use. It really is a ten beers kinda seat.
In the timeline of this story it's the beginning of december now (that's in tune with the weather at the moment). Here in
Holland most of us don't celebrate cristmas with presents and stuff, no we have sinterklaas. This is kind of the brother of
santaclaus. But he arrives two weeks earlier with a steamboat and owns a horse that can run on rooftops!
He is not accompanied by
elves, but by hundreds of negroes all named zwarte piet (black piet). They have to climb in and out the chimneys to
deliver the presents to the little children, or take them away in a big bag if they were naughty. So most of the children
behave perfectly around this time of year
. The celebration for them is a kind of Russian roulette because in most of their
minds it can go both ways...
But I must have behaved perfectly because I got a perfect present! Just look:
A second hand Girder frontfork. Long enough to level the DIZH out after the frame alteration! How could Sinterklaas have
known this? He really moves in misterious ways..
The rear bridge of the bike had to be moved to make room for the secondary drive axle. I had decided to use two
plummerblock housing bearings for this purpose. This would move the rear wheel 14 cm (about 5.5") to the back.
Unfortunately I learned from the RDW (Dutch MOT) that placing the bridge more than 10 cm to the back would result
in having to present them with a stress analysis if I ever wanted to get the bike registered
. So back to the drawing board
and rethink the plan. It took a lot of fitting, welding and grinding to eventually get a fixing for the rear bridge.
Looking at it now it doesn't seem like much but this part of the build took a long time.
Being quite convinced that I have the final geometry down now, I welded in some reinforcement plates.
After this i mounted the secondary drive axle and rear bridge to evaluate where I was at.
So far so good. Now it was time to place the engine and see if it would still fit.
A tight fit! And ofcourse I could claim that its all due to my perfect measuring skills. Thruth is i had a lot of luck
as well
.
So much for this saturday. The story of the build isn't in sync with the reallity yet, so to be continued soon.
.A 10hp diesel engine with 
