sportster

with the bmw boxer down in kent at jim cray's having some much needed bee-haich-pee shoved up it, the aermacchi sitting on the bench waiting for sweary mick's mate to get the paintwork sorted and dangerous away in the canary islands spending his winter heating allowance on sangria, it was left to me to keep the candle burning in the shed, i'd been thinking about putting a headlight back on the sporty since the end of last year, the lack of light in the autumn evenings was getting frustrating as it cut the riding season short and i was getting fed up with having to bail out early from the local bike night's due to no headlight, i'd got a couple of tiny 'projector' light's put on one side from a previous project and had idea's about mounting them one above the other, slightly off-centre like the 'stacked' lights on the ducati treble-niner's, after a couple of evening's trying to figure out how to mount them using the carbon number board on the front of the bike i decided it would look too busy so went back to the time honoured taiwanese 'bates' copy instead, i had a black powdercoated shell and rim from year's ago, [in fact barse ran it on his shovel for a summer or two before giving it me back after finding an old tractor spotlight at a jumble], so, i had the mashings but not the lens and reflector, a night on the 'tinterweb trying to find replacement gut's ended in frustration as apparently they are not as widely available as they used to be, [not the mini-bates innard's anyway, you can get the five a and three-quarter one still though], i ended up having to buy a new 'bates' mail order and decided that the chrome shell and rim was just too 'glam', i swapped the bit's around, keeping the powdercoated shell and teaming it with the chrome rim, i reckon it looks a lot more classic that way, i gently cut the blue clear plastic fullbeam indicator lens from the top of the chrome shell and stuck it into the black shell with some contact adhesive, spun up a mounting out of some roundstock and bolted it up, i reckon it looks ok and makes the front end look a lot lighter, now i just need a set of black rubber forkleg gaitors to 'drop' the front end down and make it look shorter than the massive expanse of exposed chrome forkleg and a trick little speedo......