w/e 10th August

Spent the last week away on holiday but had the weekend to get back on it.

The Atlas needs going over because it is due its roadworthiness test (MOT). The main problem in getting it through the test is the lack of speedo. I’d removed this and the rev counter because the speedo broke the cheap mechanism on the front wheel and when the mounting bracket cracked I couldn’t be bothered to cart this dead weight around any longer.

Oddly the speedo isn’t tested but has to be present (something that the tester last year raised his eyebrows at when it appeared the bike hadn’t done any additional miles – he said it must just be the odometer at fault…). Anyways a long time back I’d got a digital Koso speedo but the lack of obvious mounting point meant it just hung on the shelf.

Funky hi-tech speedo and dash

I decided what I needed to do was make a ‘dashboard’ so took a hammer to an old plastic laptop stand and fashioned the clear plastic (dremmel) to the right size to fit inside the fairing. I used shard’s off the broken stand to make up and araldite mounting points and even recycled the trim to tidy up the edges. It fits fine and roadtesting showed it would stay jammed in place – success.

Speedo sensor on front calipher

The speedo sensor is like a heavy duty job off a bicycle – the mounting bracket made use of the calipher bolt leaving a little work to locate the magnets. I cut off some threaded bar and then araldited this into the floating brake bobbins then araldited the little magnets on top of this ‘spacer’. Again a success.

Speedo magnet glued into disc bobbin

What has proved less successful is getting the idiot lights to work. The neutral didn’t work anyway which I guess is to do with the sender in the Laverda gearbox so I’m not losing sleep over this. The high beam light works (hurrah) but I couldn’t get both indicator idiot lights to do their job. Fiddled with this long enough to run out of time and have to put it all back together to get to work on Monday. I will work on this during the week – I may just remove the indicators as the rear offside doesn’t work aside from the idiot light. I will cover the dash in some black plastic to finish it off and then finally decide where to take the ‘live’ feed and then set the wheel circumference and all should be well…

Aside from the dash I have to also get the front brake light and horn to work and replace the tyres then she is good to go…I think.

Nick 🙂