Hey guys,

Some of you might remember that I did a sort of makeshift tail tidy. See the thread "" for a reminder if you want. As was stated by SDR in the thread, and as I feared it wasn't strong enough. Killed by the vibrations.
In fact, everything got distorted on the old one.

Like this:


And, despite some reinforcements it cracked too:


So, therefore I am more or less forced to build a new one.
Been tinkering in it for a few days now.

It looks like it's going to be made up of 4+1 parts. I say plus one because the licenseplate light is a bit of an odd-one.
There's two holders onto the bike. The front and rear, then there's the arm out to the plate, and then there's the indicator holder. And, the +1, a modified Motrax LED indicator license plate light.

My first goal is to fit all the bits into place. I'll then proceed to machining the bits down so that they look nicer. My mind doesn't work really well in abstract 3D and I'm too organic to sit down in a solid modelling software to model the whole shabang out before I start working on the material.

So here goes.

Cutting the front piece of aluminium with a reciprocating saw.


Front holder in situ on the bike. Note it's not finished off yet, just "functional"


Starting to drill the holes into the rear holder


The rear holder needs to be angled...


What I didn't realise was that it also needed to be angled in the other direction too. More milling!


Here's the first assembly of the rough front and rear holders


From the side:

Note that I've tried to keep as much material on the pieces so that I can hopefully shape them into something much nicer later on.

Starting on the arm. Down is at the left, and rear is down. If that makes sense.

The first step was to get the angle right.

Then a lot of cutting with the saw to get the generic shape


Then drilling and tapping the end hole of the arm. This attaches to the front holder


Something like this:


And on the bike it looks something like this after I tapped the hole for the rear holder and milled down to fit the hex-head screw so far.


This is where the indicator holder comes from


And it needs to be shaped after cutting


And so far I've only made two "holes" in it to fit the indicators, like so:


I've also made a start on the license plate light, I'll upload pics later...
Also, does anyone know any good source for allen-head bolts? I'd like to go select them myself (in UK), not order over the 'Net (I know Pro Bolt do bolts, and I've ordered other bolts from another company).

Cheerio.

A close-up of the indicator "hole"


Starting point for the plate light.


Then this:


I did make more progress last night, but I cleaned up and hurried back in, so I seem to have forgotten to take a pic.

Very good, very interesting. Thanks for taking photos.
Yer makin sure it doesn't break, aren't you.

This is the generic shape of the plate light being made.


Almost there:


And it'll go on something like this


Another view


And the LEDs in. I'm going to pour resin into the "hole" and seal it in that way.


More to come... Next it's time to fit the indicators, light and plate onto the arm.

Let me start off by saying that your work looks fantastic. I was curious at first as to why you went with such thick plate, but if you plan on shaping it latter this will give you plenty of options. You could go with a nice webbed or cross member look to it.
Looking at the photo of the license plate light i am wondering if there is anyway to sneak the wires in from behind in order to hide them somewhat. Maybe drilling a small hole in from the back just big enough to fit the wires through.

Right... A tad more progress. I knew this session wasn't going to be very long, but I still managed to squeeze in some progress.

Evening off the plate-end of the arm.

Sadly I didn't measure it, and it's now some silly size, like 11.4mm... I'll probably redo it a bit thinner.

Then the groove in the indicator bar that's to go onto the end of the arm


Drilling the hole for the indicator bar in the arm

And here I made a mistake - the hole is a bit too high, and it's drilled at the top of the indicator bar. I realised that this was a slight problem when I started to imagine the routing of the indicator wires. Now I'll have to turn it upside down, and figure out how to mount the bar a bit higher. I do have a solution to it. The drawbacks of "organic" design.

Here's the bar on the arm.

You can clearly see my little mistake here. Imagine drawing with a pen a line from the indicator up on the arm, without going past the screw.

Very kind of you, Sir Joe

Here's tonights efforts.

I've mostly been reprofiling the arm. Bottom:


And top:


Then I had to fix that annoying problem with the indicator bar being "upside down".


There it is all assembled bar the light - which is the next on the list


At this stage it all weighs a staggering 628g! :O

On the bike something like this:


And this should give you some idea of how the plate light will be positioned (but in the centre of course!)


Once the plate light is on, then I'll need to route the cables... then the lightening and beautification exercise will begin. Can't wait for that!

Stay tuned.

The Mcgiggle tail tidy was THE most beautiful tail tidy I have ever laid eyes on, I just spent 10 min's searching it out and it has been deleted,

More pictures.

I focused on the arm last night. Finally I get to destr... erhm... lighten that one...

This is somewhat how I saw things shaping up.


Cutting the first few holes.

The 6mm bits I'm using are just too big to reach into the corners deep enough... I'm thinking of attacking them with a 3mm bit later on, but that means I'll have to do all the aligning work all over again....

Weight is now down to 333g...


And arm still very unfinished, it looks like this


.... Prognosis; more work...

760g... but that includes a small plate, and OEM indicators. It's also chopped a tad, not very much, but still... Apples vs. Pears...

I'm just going to head out there to continue...

A bit more progress. Was quite knackered last night, and didn't have that long to work, so not very much progress.

I've been using the 3mm bit now to get into the corners, but it's not as straight forward as it sounds. First of all I have to align all the angles on the rotary table. This takes a lot of time between the "active milling". The second issue is that the 3mm milling bit doesn't reach all the way through the 12mm thick arm. This means that I'm going to have to redo all the work from the other side. This means that all the alignments has to be done again. And I'm sure they won't align up perfectly. We'll see.

Here's a pic showing how rough the edges are before starting the 3mm milling after using the 6mm bit.



As you can see I've to loads of work to do from the other side on the "last hole". How I'll manage to align those, I have no idea.

Milling action:


90 grams so far...


Close up...



And assembled...


If things work out today, I'll skive off a bit earlier and get some milling done before beers and curry tonight.

"Stay tuned as Beavis and Butt-Head save some baby dolphins..."

More progress. I didn't have much time during the weekend, mainly because I had a Belorussian friend visit me on Friday-Saturday and we stayed up drinking till 5am. Then on Saturday it was Finland's independence day, so I had, by law, be shitfaced all day. Sunday I was trying to de-pickle my liver...

Anyway...
The arm is now down to 83g, and I can see a little bit more coming off, from where the plate attaches.
First I cut the holes from the other side with the 3mm milling bit.


Which made it look something like this:


I then had to cut down the "tail" of the plate light;


Like this:


That was so I could determine where to stop the 45 degree angles on the arm. Which I'm making here.


That was a helluva laborious work, but made the arm look like this:

It was laborious because of:
a) I needed to angle the milling head 45 degrees to the right, and then to left
b) The table doesn't move all the distance of the arm, so I had to re-align and re-position the arm a total of 8 times; two per side. And all it lost was some 4 grammes! Bhlergh. Looks quite nice though.

I then proceeded with the rear holder. It started out something about like this.


I decided to make it simple and easy, just using a 10mm miling bit to cut a 90 degree angle.


I then countersunk the bolt head


And proceeded to remove as much material I could around the countersunk bolt head.


It attaches to the arm, something like this:


Down to 292g.

I wish it would be lighter. I don't see more than 50g coming off, which is sad because I'd love a sub-200g target.

It looks like this assembled:


And on the bike:


Close up of the rear holder and arm;


Front holder next, then plate attachment.... then ummm... loads of elbow grease, methinks...

Righto, picture time, children.

First I started working on the front holder.


Cutting the holes for the bolt heads.


From 93 to 51g in a simple step.


Looked like this:


Then I did the sides.

... 44g...

.. Or 240g in total...


On the bike:


But I wanted it lighter!


I guess 25g (of about 100g starting weight) is OK..!?


And the assembly is now 222g.


I also wanted a bit more weight off the indicator bar.


Which now looks something like this:


Next victim was the tail of the arm;


Almost done here...


one more cut...


Arm was now 77g with the end still attached.


And down to 65g after it was cut off... YAY! I'm naturally going to file the end into a round shape.


assembly was now 187g.


I then focused on the rear holder:


Which ended up being 10g


Which brought the whole shebang down to 182g


I also attacked this part:


179g!


Close up of the tail.


And the front of the assembly.


And the front from the underside.


With the shorter bolts in, it's now 172g!


Plate assembled.



Next thing I'm going to do is to sand it down to get rid of the milling marks. Then I'm going to solder the wires together and all that. Then put it on the bike for a month or so to make sure it all works well. If it does work well, I'll strip the cabling off and put some finish on it. Possibly black anodising.

What surprises me with the whole thing is that it's still very very very very rigid, despite losing a lot of weight. In fact 628g to 172g is a weight loss of 464g, or in percentage, the weight is now 27% of what it used to be. Quite pleased with that.
Also, if I did buy the correct titanium bolts, I might lose an odd 6g or so more, putting it below 170g.

That's all, folks!

Joker, Can you chamfer the 90* turns?.... were you planning to, joe does not like sharp objects, the curve represents the softness or tolerance in life.

I know that removing the corners is tedious work and requires different machinery and labour intensive elbow grease. just my mind working on your beautiful art.

Crappola... I thought I had posted the latest pics. I'll get back to you ASAP, Sir!

Good to hear, well done! So you've applied a finish to it already? What did you decide on (impatient bastard aren't I )...

I friggin thought I had written the post, and I had. Luckily I had it saved on my HDD.

Here's the post I was supposed to post on the 20th December!
Righty-ho...

More progress.
Loads of sanding has been done. Like so

And so..


Mainly using these

and a lot of elbow grease... *sigh*

And today I've put the electrickery on
Here's the plate light, lit up

Too bad you can't really see it. I've more or less, filled the hole with hot-glue-gun-glue and the LED lights of course.

Indicator cables routed:


The underside of the arm;


And on the bike it looks like this:

And like this..


And a shot from the underside:


All I need now is the connector () to make a nice non-butchered connection to the "system". I can use shiyat connectors, but I'd rather not. But I might have to in case the sun is shining tomorrow.

.... end of 20th Dec transmission.

No, I haven't applied any finish to it. I didn't want to spend money on a finish (anodising primarily) if I had to take to the milling machine again. However, now, in hindsight I haven't had to do that, but I have now glued all the cables to the tail tidy, and therefore removing the cables is going to be a bit of an effort. Bhlergh. Whicever way you turn, your arse is behind you....
So, there it is on the bike, working just fine, without any finish, for now.

If it's only hot glue then it should be fairly easy to remove from the ally, failing that just warm it up again and wipe it off.

Either way, looks great.

Joker, you do know that they make specific tools just for removing the metal parts from the plastic parts on said connector?

Dude that has to be the best looking tail tidy for a SD i have seen. Man i wish i had a garage, milling machine, know how, talent, imagination. Excellent work!!!

I've finally got round to fixing the wiring. I bought the OEM cable from KTM (~£10) and butchered it to suit.

Here's the OEM cable soldered onto my own wiring.


More shrink tubing.


That's how it looks now.


I'm quite pleased with the weights. Here's comparing as close to apples-to-apples as I can.

OEM stuff

784 grammes. It's close to OEM. The difference is that it doesn't have the same size plate as mine. This plate is smaller, and a legal plate is even larger. My plate is -1" smaller than legal, and this one fitted to the OEM tail tidy is even smaller than that. The OEM one is also chopped off a bit below the plate as you can see.

And here's my effort:

397 grammes. YAY! That's a saving of 387g. Almost half!

And here's the shot from inside of the tail unit. A bit of bodge tape to seal off the muck from the rear wheel.


The only thing that bugs me now is that I didn't anodise the whole shabang before doing the wiring. As it is now I'll have to de-solder the wiring and take it apart. Not to mention that I need to undo the lights in the plate light. It might stay this way for a while.

I can feel the intervention coming..... hehehehee

(thanks all for your support!!! I have made progress!!! WeeH00000 !! <----- just had his teeth cleaned and Oi !!! it's fresh..