Finished fab and mockup on Garys bike, part 1

This is the most hand built bike to date from Atom Bomb. The tank, fender and oil bag are all hand formed from aluminum, and of course I built the frame, exhaust, bars, controls, etc as well. I even turned and knurled the pegs, pedals and kicker pedal. Enough of me typing, have some pictures. These are like 2 meg pictures, so click on 'em for a better view.

This is what I started with on this bike. In 1976 some guys in Michigan decided to build some sort of Triumph powered digger out of sprinkler pipe. This is as far as they got. How the guy that had this thing kept up with the neck since 1976 is beyond me, but I'm pretty happy he did! Needless to say the neck is the only part of any of this nonsense I reused for the new frame.

More dirtbike suspension goodness!

I've been a bit under the weather for going on a week and a half, and have been struggling to finish fab work and mockup on a customer bike by the end of this week. Being creative when your nose is running and your whole body hurts is harder than it should be. So I haven't gotten anything done on project dirt bike, but....

We were really happy when we partnered with Race Tech Suspension for the Triumph dirtbike project. Initally they were just going to supply a set of thier killer rear shocks but they've gone pretty much all in on the project. Today we got a huge box of awesome from Race Tech full of trick parts to make the vintage 43mm KYB forks we're using work more like a modern fork and less like a hunk of shit. They sent a set of the Race Tech cartridge emulators (which are pretty much drop in modern adjustable valving, a set of springs spec'd out for the bike and Clay's weight, and even included new bushings, seals and two quarts of fork oil. We have to assume that Race Tech fork oil is a step above ATF, so the forks can't help but be better than they would be otherwise!

The week between Christmas and New years will see this project finally become a roller, as I'm going to take a few days off for the holidays. The slightly bad news, and I don't mind admitting it, is that I have to redo the back of the frame. When I built it, I didn't really acount for how long the shocks would have to be when fully open to give the travel I'm looking for. So I gotta move some tubes around before I can mount shocks. Such is life on the cutting edge of make it up as you go.

Dirt Bike Shocks!!

Race Tech Suspension just mailed us these really sexy adjustable shocks for our Triumph powered dirt bike project. They're custom built for the geometry and weight of the bike, and are close to 18" long open to give us all the travel we were looking for.

Now we can get back to work on the dirt bike....but it'll be a while untill it's done since it's a shop project.

A short note on kustom motorcycles.

It's spelled "custom', with a damn C. Not a K. Even if you went to the "Old Skool".  Thank you and have a good night.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, enjoy the long weekend!

Just a picture of some motorcycles...

I don't really have anything to talk about right now, but I wanted to see if the blog was automatically posting to our facebook group yet. Lisa Ballard was kind enough to set that up for me, since it involved HTML and other really scary stuff. Lisa Ballard rocks for doing that!

So this is the Atom Bomb blog....

For those of you that don't know me I'm Clay Rathburn, the head floor sweeper at Atom Bomb Custom Motorcycles. We make custom Triumph motorcycles, building frames, engines and most of our sheetmetal in house. I thought this blog might be a fun excuse to take artsy pictures of our work as we go along, since we usually only put completed projects on our actual website.

Put up with me while I learn how to use this thing and hopefully I'll make it worth your while. I normally post updates and progress reports on our Facebook page, hopefully I'll figure out how to link to that from here so I don't have to do everything twice.

There's some pegs I made the other day for a current project. Not that there's anything special about them, I just wanted to try posting a picture.