Fork Swap Completed

After finishing up the stem swap I went ahead with putting the GSXR front end onto the bike. I had previously stripped the bodywork and front end off the bike leaving this.

I pressed the lower bearing onto the stem and the upper and lower race into the frame.

When I installed the stem and triple onto the bike, I realized that I had a spacing issue with the lower tapered roller bearings. The lower race sits to deep in the frame. So when everything is tightened up, the lower triple clamp is drawn hard against the frame instead of against the bearing. The two ways to fix this are to put a spacer below the tapered roller bearing on the stem, or use a spacer between the bearing race and the step it seats against in the steering head. Since the bearing is already pressed on the shaft, and I don’t want a large gap between the triple and frame, I am going to do the latter and make a spacer to go underneath the lower bearing race. For now, I have left the assembly loose to mock it up. Everything is within .100 inches so it should be adequate for this purpose.

The bore in the top triple clamp is too big, so I built up the diameter of the stem with duct tape. I also put some duct tape under the nut for now. In the final version, I will be sure to trim the duct tape to fit. After this, installing the GSXR forks was fairly straight forward.  So was removing them so I could put the clip-on bars on before re-installing them.

I looked through our garages motorcycle wheel collection and nothing fits the rather sizable front axle off of the GSXR. I am a bit worried that it will make it tough to put anything other than a GSXR front wheel on the bike. I might have to make a custom front axle with some spacers to make everything work out. For now, I am just going to kick that can down the road as I focus on mocking up the rest of the bike. In this shot, the front axle is within a half inch of the correct height off the ground. So this gives a reasonable idea of the bikes static ride height. The rear wheel is the stock FT 18″ wheel which I will probably replace with a 17″ wheel. However, I am also likely going to longer rear shocks, so those should offset each other. I have to admit that looking at this shot and drawing in the rest of the bike in my mind is getting me excited about how this will turn out. Then again, I’ve had 3 Manhattan’s so I should probably reevaluate in the morning!