1978flh04

1978 FLH BUILD, PAGE 4

For the job of final assembly I had two of the best men on the East Coast help me. The final build was done at Hartman Top Fuel Cycles in Canton Georgia. Greg and Shane have a full-on shop with a complete machine shop, in-house powder coating, dynamometer and everything a person could need for building a bike right. To oversee the build Pete Minor of PM Fab, a custom Top Fuel car and bike builder, came down from South Carolina and spent two weeks making sure everything was done to perfection. With Greg and Pete both lending their expertise there was no way this bike was going to turn out other than perfect. The entire shop lent a hand on this build with Shane doing all of the powder coating, Josh feeding us parts as fast as we could bolt them on and Travis helping anytime he could. It was a real life version of the "Build or Bust" television show. I got to build my own bike but had a shop full of experts assisting me and taking the reigns whenever I got in over my head.

The 5 speed primary was cut apart and rewelded so that we could make the Evo, Revtech 6 speed and 4 speed frame all get along. I guess if this thing breaks I ain't stopping by the closest MoCo dealership for parts. The shock mounts were shaved from the swing arm and moved to the center of the arm. This served two purposes. First it allowed the addition of a custom brake mount for the late model 11 inch brake caliper and let us use a jam nut against the shock bolt so that we could adjust the preload on the bottom shock bushings. Pretty high tech, eh?

As I kept adding devices such as an alarm, speedometer calibration unit and other fluff it started getting hard to find locations to mount these gadgets. I wanted all of these items to be concealed but easy to access if the need arose to make adjustments. I remembered some aluminum project boxes I had left over from some old electronic projects and had a brainstorm. I polished one of the boxes, bolted it to the frame and buried the starter relay, speedo calibration unit, alarm rest button and remote pager antenna right in plain sight.

SHINY NEW EVO SILVER & CHROME ENGINE HITS THE DOOR