Building My Cycle Carrier Out of Metal From the Wooden Template

Saturday January 13, 2018, Guerneville CA.

Working on the project

Today was going to be a project day, so when I got it going I went outside to start things going but it was too cold to get started.

Charging a battery

I hooked up the battery charger to the battery in my old Toyota so it’ll have enough juice when I try to start the engine soon.

Burr cold

That was it and back in the house I went chilled through.

After about an hour I tried again determined to make it this time. It had warmed up a couple more degrees and wasn’t quite as bad.

Fabricating the Carrier parts

My main project today was to fabricate the van’s motorcycle carrier out of steel.

I removed my wooden model of the carrier from the van.

Cutting and drilling

I cut the metal to size and was laying out the holes to be drilled when my back gave me a warning, so I moved all this up on my welding table to continue.

Deburring and laying out

I had to remove all the burrs off the metal pieces so I did a first pass on that as I’ll have to do more in a bit.

I laid out all the holes I need to drill as accurately as I could.

Drilling holes

And then drilled them all out using my drill press.

I then beveled all the metal in the places I was going to weld up and finished deburring things.

Arc welded the parts together

I cranked up the arc welder and welded up all the pieces and chipped the slag off the new welds.

I finished just before dark. The parts need some paint, but I’ll wait until I get it all made and tested before painting.

Metal parts I constructed today

These are the two parts I made today for the cycle carrier.

I still need to make the levers and the hinged cycle mounting bracket so I still have quite a lot to do but a good start.

That was my day.