Saturday December 16, 2017 Guerneville CA.
Figurintg out the motorcycle crane
No use getting outside too early today, not until the sun was shining onto my work area, just before noon.
I was going to work on my motorcycle crane for the back of my van.
Just make something
I got the tools out and some metal to construct the crane. In truth, I’m not sure about most of the measurements, I’m not sure what will work, so I just have to make something to test things out.
I decided to use a piece of square stock and had to weld some pieces on the end to mount it on the van’s top rack.
Here I’m welding the mounts on.
Needed to get measurements
I needed some measurements from a motorcycle so I walked over to where my brother’s bikes were parked and got the measurements.
Adjusted the bikes handlebars for a ride
As long I was there I might as well go for a ride so I hoped on this one, but first I adjusted the handlebars as the bike seemed a bit squirrelly the time I rode it before and I thought the bars made me sit too far back on the bike to have much control, so I adjusted them to see.
That worked well
I noticed the difference right away as soon as I took off, much better.
I rode up the hill along this road.
When I got to the the top I took a break before heading back down the hill.
Guerneville
Here’s what the small town of Guerneville looks like today.
Welded and drilled
Now that I had some measurements, I did some more welding and drilled some holes to mount the crane.
I try to design things as simple as possible so this is what I ended up with.
Now I need to experiment with the crane
Now that I have a crane I can experiment and see how this might all work. What I can see right away is it would be better if I had a smaller bike for this. I’ll have to think on this and play with things a bit as I’m not real happy with this method. Maybe just a smaller bike. I don’t really need a big powerful bike to ride around in the desert, just a little transportation bike to get around on the back roads that are too overgrown with brush for the van.
The sun went behind the mountains to the west and the day started to cool down so I went inside and that was my day.