I haven't worked on the RD400 cafe racer in a while because I've been busy on Michelle's Midget. That's taken quite a bit of time designing and fabricating on that. So after stumbling around the garage, tripping over all the projects, I said feck it: I'm finishing the RD400 cafe racer. Since it's stupid cold here, I decided that painting is not an option; it will have to be powdercoated. So piece by piece came off the bike. If it wasn't perfect, I tossed it into the powdercoat bag...and the bag grew and grew. Eventually, my bike was reduced to almost nothing. Not what I had in mind, but wheatever.

So what started as the wheels needing PC, all sorts of stuff contributed to a $300 powdercoaters bill!! Michelle isn't so happy about that one. Truth is, I sweated te powdercoaters out of $65, so it could have been worse. And the truth is, I like the PCers; I used them on my se7en, Shaun's cafe racer and now this one.

The other pics are some of the fabrication I did on the parts. The expansion chamber pipes I have on the cafe racer foul the kickstand. People do all sorts of crazy stuff to keep that from happening. Me? I just notched the kickstand, bent is slightly, then welded it back.

Also, I wanted to keep the stock mid-controls. But stock, they have these dropped loops that provide clearence for the stock pipes. Actually, they look and work great with the stock pipes. But they look shit with expansion chambers. So I painstakenly chopped and modded them to look cool. This looks easily, but in truth, it's difficult to get all those angles to work perfectly in three different dimensions. To add to the difficulty, I had to have my daughter hold the assembly together whislt I TIGed it back together. I wish I had a pic of that.

I wish I had more pics, of all the suff I sent to PC, but I'll take them when I pick the stuff up.