Rob, that's a real beauty! Would love to add something like that to the stable!
Topic jump question, and don't know if you might know: I love the look of your Scrambler's chain guard -- any idea whether it might also fit the SuperHawk?
Ready for the Motogiro East Spring 2011 Event
It breaks the same as your CB guard. ..........lm
Taking this topic (temporarily) into another realm, but I was just speaking with my friend Lee last night, and he is considering attempting to make a guard out of carbon fibre for me. He can get the material pretty easily, and if he can make a 'negative' mold of the guard, he thinks he can probably do it. My mechanic seems to think that if there were more mounting area on the swingarm coming in contact with the guard, then that would help too (in addition to the rubber mounting). We're determined to build a better mousetrap!
Back to the original subject of the thread -- I'd love to participate in the Moto Giro, but I don't think my bike would now qualify now that it's a 358cc. Think they'd notice the difference?????? Nobody checks for that. I'm sure there are 250 Sprints running with 350 kits on them. The idea is to make it a fun event and not a crazy race event. When I look at the chain guard mount on my '76 Bonneville, it is not much more than what the CL77 has. Personally, I think that the mount brackets were too thin for the weight of the chainguard. That guard is a huge pendulum vibrating to the beat of the engine and amplifying it in the process. I'm not surprised that they all break. That's why I beefed mine up when I welded it back together. I also think another key contributor to the failures on these is the stamped brackets. These are punchings with a pretty ragged edge on them that are then stamped with a 90 deg ridge around the periphery to emulate a much thicker bracket. That ragged edge presents a huge number of stress risers for the initiation of cracks. Lastly, I tend to think that the steel they used was not the proper grade for the application and that further contributed to cracks. Probably recycled stuff left over from WWII. When I cleaned the braze from mine, I found cracks starting at the bolt hole, which means the flat material was flexing while the out edge was staying rigid due to the 90 deg edge. Mine might crack again at another location. We'll see. Since you have to modify the chain guard to fit your bike, Vince, why limit yourself to hard to find, collectible chainguards. Why not find a nice looking guard from some UJM and adapt that to your bike. Even a plastic guard would work and you could Bulldog it and paint it to look like steel. I know it is your bike, but to me carbon fiber on a vintage Honda is like putting baby moon hubcaps on a 930 Porsche, unless of course you paint it to hide the carbon fiber mat. regards, Rob
I'll make this the last post regarding chain guards in this particular thread -- very sorry for inadvertently hijacking it.
One of the very interesting things is that many bikes have their chain guards on the left side of the bike, while the SuperHawk's is on the right. I see a lot of great plastic chain guards as well as deeply valanced ones out there for other CB's, Triumphs etc, but oftentimes they are mirror images of what the SuperHawk would need. Don't know if it became some odd requirement that all bikes had to have their chains on the left side of the bike, but it seems that after about 1968 the left side became the norm (at least from what I've found). Back to the Moto Giro -- it looks really interesting, and would be a great alternative to doing another year at Mid-Ohio.
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