I haven’t been bored to death with the front end and 860 kit info Tony. I’ve been going over it all very keenly and picking up loooots of info! They are all interesting, doable and practical mods that may make it a little less R65, but it’s probably a much better bike for all the work, thus the reward for doing it.
Frame chops for Muppet Racer ‘builds’ are hmmm, really unfortunate.... Anyone old enough to remember the Easy Rider inspired crazzze of “Chopperising” in the 70s with raked steering heads and extended forks with hardtail conversions, can see that we’re unfortunately entering the same sort of phase. There were so many beautiful old British bikes that met their end through that era... Having owned a rigid framed Beesa for 25 years, I have no idea why you would ever want to convert a swinging arm frame to a hard tail!
The difference with your dilemma, is that you are changing a frame in order to make it perform better, provide better tyre choices and suspension options to match its new output etc etc etc. That’s a really different proposition to chopping a frame up because, well.... you think it ‘looks better’, despite the fact that it doesn’t perform as well, or as safely or as comfortably as it was before you started. To me, that’s a really genuinely objective improvement versus an entirely subjective choice.
Funny thing, but in my search for original bits to de-Rat my ‘Rat Bike’ that I’m working on, I ran across this guy, about an hour down the road from me.
https://rooneycycle.com/If you want an example of objective improvement versus subjective modification, it underlines my point entirely. My mind got blown.....
Paul was a good source of original bits for me! and he has a few spare frames as well! but he is certainly well aware of how important all those original bits are going to be to people like me in the future, returning R65’s back into R65’s! Mind you, they won’t be returning Paul’s bikes back to standard, or probably yours either.
