Wow! This has been a long slow project. I have not posted for quite some time as family life and work has taken priority of my time, This project is not done but a major milestone has been reached. Café ala Carte is now on the road for shake down testing. After debug it will still need paint, polish, and powder coating.
I am currently working on jetting in my Mikuni TM36 carb which is proving to be quite a job but I am getting close. I did add a temporary O2 sensor and Air/Fuel mixture gage and that has been a huge help since the carb came way over jetted and no guidance to even start by.
I have done all the work myself except for the upholstery of the seat, the ceramic coating the header, and the fabricating of the muffler.
For those who are not familiar with the project here are links to my past posts.
12/07 update
http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1196943498/06/08 update
http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1196943498/34#343/09 update
http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1237084786/7#710/09 update
http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1257039622/0Also if you want to see my previous projects go to
http://www.street-unique.comFor now here are some current pictures.
Notice in the next picture how the header takes a nice side step around the front frame rail. Yet, from the photo after that one you can see from the side it still looks like the classic BSA header. THIS TOOK HOURS TO GET RIGHT. I made that header from J-Bends (mandrel bent blanks) where each section is cut and welded together and then the welds ground smooth. There are 8 sections that make up that header. All ground smooth and then ceramic coated in black.
The muffler is a beautiful piece of custom work done by Epco Stainless out of Ohio. They built the muffler to my design and print in polished stainless steel. It is made up of two rolled cones (so they technically have a seam in the back) and a short straight at the connection point. They fabricated it and ground out all the welds and mirror polished it. I cannot find any of the welds except for one tiny weld pit on the back side. Absolutely stunning considering a mirror finish quickly shows optically any surface waves.
Some explanation on these tail lights. Inside I have LED’s tail lights from a SV650 that have been split and laid on their side. They match the curve of the tail and point directly rearward then so it worked out. I wanted frenched in lenses so here is how it was done. Before any windows were cut in the tail, I took 3/16” thick red acrylic and heated in the oven to the softening point. Then I stretched it over the tail section in the place I was going to put them and allowed them to cool. I made 4 for each side so I would have extras. Then I cut the openings in the fiberglass tail section. From there I cut the lenses to fit. I then had to go back and heat and form 1/8” clear acrylic over the same areas so I could cut rings of it for form a flange for the inside of the lens to hold it in the tail. I bonded those rings to the lenses such that the lenses were flush with the tail. Now they fit perfectly and match the 3 dimensional curves of the tail section.
Hope you enjoyed it. I will try to update in the future as I have tons of photos of the custom work and much detailing to come.