Made With Metals Ep. 2 | Welding a Woven Brass Motorcycle Rack
MWM EPISODE 2 // In Episode 2, Carl Bjorklund from Super Rat joins Joe Clark in the shop to weld a uniquely woven brass and silicon bronze motorcycle rack on one of his personal bikes! If you enjoyed the video, don’t forget to subscribe and click the notification bell for upcoming releases!
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Co-produced By Online Metals & First Article Productions
Filmed By: Jesse Larson & Brad Justinen
Edited By: Jesse Larson
https://jklvideo.com/
Need Metals? http://bit.ly/shopmetals
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Materials Used:
0.125" x 1" Brass Rectangle Bar 360-H02 Extruded - https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/b...
0.625" Silicon Bronze Round Bar 655-H04 - https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/b...
0.375" Silicon Aluminum Bronze Round Bar 642-Hr50 - https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/b...
0.75" Silicon Aluminum Bronze Round Bar 642-Hr50 (the parts that mount to the bike fenders) - https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/b...
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#madewithmetals #buymetalsonline #onlinemetals #motorcycle #bikelife
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TRANSCRIPT:
It's an addiction. But it's a good addiction. There's something about being on two wheels. You feel like you can go anywhere or do anything. My name's Carl Bjorklund and I'm with Super Rat.
Carl Bjorklund is a friend of mine. Mostly we just come over here, to Carl's shop, and just hang out.
Sometimes we just sit around and talk for an hour, just bouncing ideas off each other.
What do you want to do to the bike, Carl?
This is my own bike, so I was wanting to build a little rack here.
No, I thought it'd be cool to do a project with Carl because he's always making something and always down to make something.
If you're a fabricator, or a creator, or maker, there's always more to learn.
Well, the plan was just to make a rack I guess.
Well, I think this one looks good here. We had a couple of bullet points. We wanted to do some kind of thing that looked like a weave on top. We wanted to do wraps. Come down slow.
He knew what he wanted it to be roughly, I don't know, 12-inches long by roughly nine inches wide.
You can only make it so small before the corners all start running into each other. Plus you don't want a really big bike with a really small rack.
In this case here we used brass and Silicon bronze. The brass looks really cool and it's a nice contrast to the bronze but it's not readily weldable. But the Silicon bronze welds pretty buttery.
It's so hard to make shapes out of metal. That's kind of why I'm drawn to metal; I like to punish myself. That's slick.
We, in advance, had made a die. It's for actually crimping that weave aspect into it. And just a little Sharpie center line on there which we lined up with the center lines of each individual press. Carl just worked 'em through there and it worked pretty slick. Now we have all four of these pieces which are gonna turn into corners. We got 'em drilled with a 3/16th hole so we can put these plugs in 'em. And the reason for that is when we weld this thing together you can see how perfect the alignment ends up being. We've got 5/8ths here and 5/8ths. They pretty much need to be 4 5/8ths inches and they're about a half-inch long.
The 90-degree bronze pieces, that was so cool when they came together and that seam just disappeared.
All right, let's see if this works. Pressing all those, we just used Sharpie lines, and so I have a little bit wondering, "Well, are these things going to just drop in?" They're nice. 'Cause, when you have a close tolerance of pieces that are all in a row, you can tell when one gets off, but they look great.
One of the things that we thought was a good idea was to basically bisect the support bar as such that we could sort of tightly wrap it around the support hoop up top there. We ripped the length of it on the band saw and then cleaned it up with the sander. Manually formed it over a piece of the material. One of the last steps is we've run a 5/8ths mill end down through it to perfectly shave the inside. So when we finally wrapped it over the bar it just had a precise fit to it.
Neither of us are professionals at heating and bending metal around objects. I was really happy that those all came out nice. I guess if you buff one thing, you have to buff everything. If you know screws and hardware, you're going to look at it and be like, "Oh whoa, they buffed the screws too, that's cool!"
I don't care who you are, nice rack. I think it's pretty cool overall. This thing looks like a polished wedding ring.
We pretty much got exactly what we set out to do.
We wanted to do the woven stuff. We wanted to mix bronze and brass. And then we wanted to do wraps. It turned out better than I expected.
And he's got really low standards, too.
Yeah. So, it's great. Something we built that actually works. That's a win.