All the pieces are now fit to our liking, and I have tacked all the pieces into place. We must have measured about 25 times from various spots to confirm everything was straight. Since we don't have a frame jig , we use our welding bench to fasten everything down as good as possible. This is to help prevent everything from moving while we weld.
The welding produces alot of heat, which makes everything warp. To help minimize movement, be sure to move from joint to joint and be sure to be patient and let it cool some between passes. Many things have been ruined by simply not taking some time to let the project cool down before welding some more. Here I am getting ready to do some welding.
After we have done some welding, we take the time to do some more measuring to make sure nothing has moved. This also helps you kill some time to allow the "heat affected zone" to cool down. Here you can see that we utilize a .750" piece of all-thread to keep the axle plates the exact measurement apart that TC Bros. specifies for this hard tail kit.
Here I am doing some more welding. We also utilize the motor to keep the frame straight and perfect,so be sure to torque all the mount bolts to what they will be when your final assembling, it can make a difference. This particular area of the frame requires so additional fitting, as the ends that connect to the backbone are not "coped" , they are just cut straight, and it make for large gaps at the top and bottom. We go through alot of work to fix this, and is one of the secrets that we will keep to ourselves and let you figure out if you are going to weld it up yourself.
This is a good example picture to show you how we have welded this as much as possible before we unbolt everything to finish up the welds we can't get to with the motor in place.
In this picture you can see how I had to throw alot of heat into welding up the underside of the backbone. It has a large "heat affected zone" but it's not to big, and doesn't connect, so I think it will be very strong. Stay tuned to our blog for the next installment of How-To install a weld on hardtail kit from TC Bros on a Yamaha XS650.
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