Clip-on Fabrication Begins

With the carburetors close to finished I decided the next step was to start fabricating the clip-on handle bars.  I’d been looking around the inter-webs for awhile for something strong and adjustable.

What I finally settled on were the clip-ons made by Vagrant Cycle. Carpy sells them over at www.CB750cafe.com .  My dad got to work on a schematic and here’s what we came up with as best we could guesstimate –

The bars I’m going to use will be 7/8″ to accommodate my existing controls, and the clip-ons will fit my 36mm fork tubes. I’m either going to anodize or powder coat these a similar satin black to match the frame, unless I decide to get a little crazy with some color and then who knows.

We got to looking through the scrap pile and found a couple blocks to start with:

And we started whittling away –

Took a few more measurements and kept going –

 

 

 

 

 

And here is where we’ve left off.  All these pictures are an accumulation of about 2 days and 11 hours of work.  We finished with recessing the holes and cutting the threads for bolts which will clamp down on the handle bars.  We’ve still got another 7+ hours of work to go, including putting the right amount of bend into the steel tubes I’ve got on order and then powder coating on top of that.   We’re figuring cost wise with materials and labor we’re running about $400 – $500 dollars if we were paying someone for the same service.  I’m having a great time learning all this, but in the future I’ll probably just buy the Vagrant made ones.

Thanks for reading!