Click for bigger.

Man, I just love the idea of building your own monstrous disk sander. Yes, their are low cost alternatives out there, but you build this thing right, and use a good motor and it will outlast your great grandkids.

Neat little tool to make things easier, seems like it would be pretty easy to make one for yourself.

I find it completely fascinating how much attention this one bike has stirred up around the internet. Everyday the post gets more comments and other blogs are still posting about it (thanks for linking back). The coolest thing to come out of it though is finding out more about the bike. Pat Murphy dropped me a line last week, check out what he has to say:

My name is Pat Murphy and I am the one that restored the bike for Frank Westfall. I’m amazed at all the interest in the bike. I put a lot of effort into repairing and fixing the machine while trying not to destroy its originality. I was riding it around the neighborhood just last evening! Frank has original pics of O Ray Courtney on the bike in 1936 and also in the 40’s. It appears that he rode the machine quite a lot. There is also a patent in his name from the 30’s on the streamlined body style. He made several of these weird machines, each unique. Frank has another one (called the enterprise which is an Indian) and he has a pic of Courtney on the streamliner next to his son in WW2 military clothes sitting on another unique machine that I assume he also made. It took me forever to fix the body and paint it but I can’t begin to imagine how long it took Courtney to make it. Just conceptualizing the design was an incredible feat and accomplishment for him. Everything was gas welded with steel rod. No electric welding or brass. Thanks for your interest. Here are a few pics without the body. Notice the swing arm rear suspension with springs and knee-acting shock absorber. It also has a rear hydraulic brake. The rims are cast aluminum split rims that appear to be from an airplane. The only tires I could buy were from an aircraft supply house.

How crazy is it to see it with out the shell? I realize it takes away the sex appeal, but I love seeing the reality behind the curtain. I imagine seeing what lies beneath the bodywork will ruin it for some people, but to me it makes it that much cooler. What lies on the surface is incredible, but what lies beneath it is equally so. Thanks to Pat for checking in, and to JKR as well.

Jeremy Cupp at LC Fabrications is continually building head turning, killer custom bikes and his latest creation continues the trend. Dubbed the “Chicken Salad” and built on the venerable Yamaha XS650 platform, the bike oozes cool with it’s simple lines, hand crafted parts and slickly engineered components. From the cantilevered seat suspension to the dirt track inspired front half, this bike has it going on. For a full tech sheet and more info, click the read more link below.

Tool Post Grinding

Ball Bearing Center

Convex Turning Tool Holder

Good info, click for bigger.

Chances are you might have a lot of this stuff already kicking around your garage (except for the ball-joint head). I have a cheapo version of this that I got at Lowes with the suction cup mount - not recommended. The suction cup has very little gripping power, so until modify it to give the base more weight, it’s pretty much useless. This version is infinitely more versatile and the design of the base allows you to clamp it to a bench if needed handle heavier stuff.

The past few days have been pretty crazy as far as web traffic goes. After Chris over at BikeExif posted a story about the 1930 Art Deco Henderson photos I took, web traffic shot up like crazy. The story was subsequently picked up by a number of large blogs like Jalopnik, Wired, The Cool Hunter and Gizmodo driving folks back to Knucklebuster, the traffic went through the roof. Crazy numbers for this site - for reference, this site averages about 20,000 unique visitors a month - fairly small potatoes in the big world of internet traffic. From July 17th through yesterday we’ve had over 60,000 unique visitors. That’s triple the monthly traffic in only 9 days - the peak was over 16,000 visitors in 1 day. I know that’s no big deal when compared to large sites that are getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of hits everyday day - but man, I gotta say it felt pretty cool to know that so many people were checking this out and digging it. Knucklebuster is not my livelihood, but it is something I am passionate about and take seriously, so the additional attention is pretty cool - even if it is only focused on 1 post versus the entire spirit of the site.

So to everyone checking out the site for the first time - welcome. If you happen to poke around beyond the single post that brought you here you’ll find that the 2-wheel gospel we preach is focused on spreading the do-it-yourself, built-not-bought mentality. This site is not brand, style or country of origin loyal - we’re open to all makes, models and styles although the slant is certainly gears towards heavily modified customs, choppers, café racers, street trackers and vintage bikes. Most posts on this site can be placed into 2 categories (1) do-it-yourself articles (2) visual inspiration. There is a ton of great useful information to help the the obsessive moto junkie posted under the how-to section - including hundreds of vintage tech articles & books about metalworking and moto mechanics. The site gets updated daily and I try to stay on top of responding to comments as much as I can (this is a 1 man show over here, so responses are not always lightning fast). If you’ve built a bike and want to send it in for consideration, check out the submissions section - I try to post the best submissions I get a few times a month and I always dig seeing what’s coming out of the garages of the folks who read this site.

For those of you who have been coming here for a long time, the song remains the same. This little blip of attention is not going to change the content or focus of the site - if anything, it makes me want to move faster on implementing some of the ideas I’ve been tossing around in my head (including publishing more in-depth written content & editorials).

Thanks to all for stopping by
Grail

P.S: Thanks to Chris @ BikeExif, Ryan @ the JJ and all the other sites helped spread the word.  

Classic Bike Dossier on the Kawasaki Z1. Still looks sharp more than 30 years later. For my tastes, very few bikes are coming straight out of the factory looking this good.

Getting up close during my last visit to Acme Choppers.

Checking and setting clearances on a DOHC engine. Click for bigger.