Knucklehead Harley Build Part 5: Assembly

Hello, welcome back to Fix My Hog. I'm Kevin Baas from Baas Metal Craft Vintage Bike Addiction. Today, we're going to go through the final assembly of our 1947 Knucklehead, now, as you saw in the past here, the other videos, we took this bike apart, we went through all the ins and outs, found out what was wrong with it, things that needed to be fixed, and addressed all those issues to make a good, solid, reliable rider bike. Now be aware of this bike, as we put it together, we're not doing a hundred point restoration. This is not a complete every nut and bolt the way it was from the factory.

This is a chopper, a little cut down Bobber, and it's going to be a rider, we're just putting this bike together with parts that we know are safe and reliable. Some of the stuff isn't worthy of a hundred point restoration where everything would have to be exactly perfect, but in this case, we don't care about that. We want a bike that's going to look cool, it's going to function safely, it's going to go down the road and turn heads, and make the owner smile and, miles and smiles we always say. So as we go through this bike, just understand that, that we're putting this together kind of the chopper style, but it's going to be done safely. It's going to be done in a way that we know that this bike can go down the road straight and true.

Now looking at our new frame, as we talked about in the other episodes, the old frame had the crossbar here cutout, there was some structural problems in the backbone here and this new frame, that we have, a donor frame is a Knucklehead frame, correct for this motor which is great because now we won't have to worry about shim issues like we did on that panhead frame. And there's a few tabs cut off in a few things, but overall, this frame is straight and true. We put her in our frame jig, we lasered it. We made sure everything was down the road straight, and it's ready to go back together. So now today, what we're going to start with is when you get your bike taken apart and you're ready to do final assembly, you always want to lay your parts out.

Get them organized, kind of like we talked about when you take it apart, put it on a bench or a shelf or a table in sequence, that way you can work backwards, opposite sequence to put this thing back together, because it basically is going to go back together the same way you saw me take it apart, so that's fun. It's exciting times knowing this bike's going to get back together, it's going to be running today and going down the road, and just be aware, as a builder at home, if you're a novice and you're just learning this stuff, take your time, lay this stuff out, do inventory, make sure you got the right tools, ask questions, do the Fix My Hog research, and you'll be able to do this. It can be done, so today, what we're gonna do now is start out with just our basic roller. Every bike wants to start as a rolling chassis, we call it, and that means you can move it around the shop if you're not quite ready. Some people when they're building a bike like this, it could take months, you're going to piece it together a little bit here and a little there.

So you want to get that bike into rolling chassis style so you can move it around, put it out of the way if you need to take some time off to go scrounge parts or go get tires changed and all that kind of stuff. So we're going to show you how to make this bike now a rolling chassis. We have our front end all assembled. We do have a new tire on order that we're going to put on here at a later date. So today, we're going to run it with the one that was on it, but we went through our bearings, greased everything.

We're all good to go there, we're going to put our front end into the frame, get our top triple tree on, get that down. And then we're going to put the rear tire on and get this thing, so again, it's called a rolling chassis. So to start, we're going to work with the front end and I'm going to have my assistant, Mario, give me a hand holding up the springer. Get the wires out of the way. All right.

There we go, okay, so now once we have the front end seated and our bearings are all cupped in, nice, we're going to put our crown nut on and that's going to lock this in so it can't pull out. We do grease up our bearings and we do grease everything up real nice so that it's going to function smoothly. This is our crown nut and it has the top dust shield built into it to protect that bearing from any debris. And I as turn that in, I'm going to grab my crown nut tool shortly. It's right in front of you, right there.

It's there, so this special tool fits on that crown nut. Now, we can tighten this up. Again, make sure you grease your bearings good. Get everything cleaned up real good. You don't want to any grease grit or not grease, but you don't want any grit or grime, dirt, rocks, things that are laying around from the parts being moved into those bearings.

You want your bearings to be smooth, free, greased up nicely so that you don't have to worry about them for a long time. And when you tighten your neck up now, you got to worry about over tightening, you don't want to over-tighten this, all right, you do want to, for your bike, check your manual, look at the torque specs, torque it to the correct torque specifications. This one here, we're going to take it, snug it up. And then, I'll usually lift up the frame and give it a little twist, make sure there's no wiggle, and make sure it's just enough resistance so that it's not too tight, but it's not sloppy. So we got our cups, everything's tight, the front end is tight, nothing's rattling, so we know we're good there, and we'll get our handlebars back on on our top triple tree.

And, we're going to watch our wires. There we go. We'll use our brass hammer here, got that? Yeah, got it. Give it a couple of taps.

Okay, you can let go of that for right now. Now, what we're going to do is get the rear tire on because actually what can happen with these front ends too and the springer post is there could be a little flex in spring so we want to get this thing up where it's going to sit normally as a rule in chassis level. Then I can finish installing my top tree. Get that thing seated down nice, and then we'll start getting ready to hook up all the other components. So at this point, Mario, if you could lift the back up, I'm going to put that engine stand on her.

Whoop. Hang on, let me get behind here. Now, using a little scissors jack like this is a great idea because now I can adjust this up or down, it makes it easy if you are by yourself, putting a rear tire so you don't have to have somebody else lifting on a frame. I can get it set up so my axle is going to slide through at the correct height, so I'm not trying to put the axle in crooked or cockeyed, so these little scissors jacks are a good little addition to any shop when you're working on a bike, you can see how easily it just lifts up the rear end. Now for the rear of this bike, we had a 16 inch tire and it was wore out, and we changed it up a little bit.

So I got something to show you here. The new tire that's going on, this is actually a 15 inch, 15 inch rim laced to a star hub wheel so we're able to run one of these 5x15 old school car tires and then I put a set of my ripple wheel covers that I make on here to kind of dress it up. Still a drum brake, remember the mechanical brake, drum brake style, again with anything, check your stuff before you reassemble. If you need to replace drums, if they're wore out, if they're ground down, this is a good time to do that. This one still has some life in it so we're good there.

Check your brake pads, make sure everything's good and working condition, you don't want grease or oil on those pads that could cause the brake not to work properly, and everything checked out there. And then remember our brakes stay, we talked about the importance of a good solid brake stay so that doesn't snap off and cause any injury or problems when you're trying to stop. So everything looks good there. We're going to get our tire lined up. All right, when you're installing a drum brake, mechanical drum brake style rear assembly on your motorcycle, you'll notice there's a, the drum does rotate, there's a spacer here, a center spacer here, there's some flats on this.

Those flats have to be vertically up and down to fit inside your axle plate on the flats. Very important, the other thing is you have your brake stay and this can rotate, your brake stay to be parallel to the ground so that it can fit inside the brake stay bracket there, so we got to keep everything in alignment, your brake stay, and your flats should go parallel to the ground, when I wheel this in, carefully line up that flat and it should slide into your axle plate nice and smooth. And then we wanna check our brake stay and rotate our brake stay up. So the brake stay fits inside the brake stay slot. Now that we have our spacer through the axle plate and our brake stay, now we put on our drum brake hardware, we have our spacer for our axle adjuster and then the drum brake nut here that'll hold that drum brake to the axle plate straight and true.

And now that can't come away and walk off, and it keeps everything tight, and straight parallel to the frame. So at this point, now we're going to put the axle through. So the axle is going to be coming out here. When the axle sticks through you have your lock washer, locking washer mechanism that goes on to the axle there over the drum brake nut, and then our final axle nut goes on and then obviously we want to leave this loose for right now, 'cause we're going to need to do a little bit of movement, forward, back to get everything lined up when we get our chain on and do our chain adjustment and tension there, but that's it. And then when I bring it up now, you should see the tire spin without any binding.

Everything looks good there. One last tap of the axle to get it all the way through. And now you have, as you can see, what's called the rolling chassis. This bike, I can take it to get it off the lift, I can wheel it around the shop, I can move it around, like I say, if you're not ready to finish it right now, or you want to take it to the outside, get some pictures, get a look at it, do anything else that might come up as you look at it because you want to visualize the bike done now. I like to really look at it and just kind of see the flow, new frame so obviously the geometry is similar to the old frame, just make sure things look good.

Everything seems to fit good and then we can move on from there, so now that we got that to the rolling chassis, we're going to take a break and then we'll get ready to put the motor and transmission back in.