Featured Dealer Visit On Holiday, With Pics!

Nice paint job....

 

Thats a pretty tidy job DD, I think youre being a bit harsh.
A lot of welds like this in terms of access etc is hard to complete let alone better whats been done here which is no doubt on thin wall tubing. Even mandrel bending of larger sections may not give the required radii to satisfy such a one off. Obviously this, even if the tooling allowed, would need numerous samples to be created to get the desired distances and more importantly the orientations correct.

Its easy to make it look nice and fancy on thicker wall stuff less so on normal 1.2 mm or so exhaust tubing!

 

DD you could, if the welds had been purged (gas on the inside when welded to give full thickness clean welds) safely polish the outside welds off carefully like with a die grinder or dremel.
This would give you a smoother although still angular look but would take quite a while to complete.
Personal choice i suppose but maybe it came down to time/cost?

 

With you on this one DD - looks to me like something you would stumble over on the yellow brick road. However, I can’t weld and have no fashion sense so kudos to whoever made it and I probably missed the point completely!

 

I could do that, but what did the customer specify?
Sometimes like on two stroke expansion chambers intact welds with the inherent heat affected zones, all lacquered up and with no postweld cleaning looks quite nice in my opinion but each to their own.

 

OsteKuste
Thanks for sharing those. But like Dozers Dad those welds would put me of. Looks to me as a bodge job. But great machines.
Regards
Joe.

 

Terrific photos and write-up, OsteKuste! What a great dealership Tampa Triumph sounds like. I'll definitely make it a point to go there if I make it over to that part of the country.

I rather like some of the welding like that on the Thruxton R. I've seen it around town here and my understanding is that it's called Tig welding and is often done on stainless pipes. Here are some pics I just pulled up from a quick search.



Not this past year but last year (April 2018) I got the opportunity to go to a bike show in Austin called The Handbuilt Motorcycle Show. There were a handful of bikes that had similar welding styles. And it definitely seemed like a style that was as much for style than function. I chatted with one of the young builders who had a bike there and he shared with me how he learned to weld specifically to be able to do his own bike builds. His bike had Tig welded headers and was totally bad a*s. I'll look back at my photos from the Handbuilt Show in the next week or so and post some pics. I'm definitely planning to go back to Austin again in the next year or two for the show--it was that fun!

Again, awesome photos and commentary, OsteKuste. Thanks!

 

Looks a great shop, thanks for the pics.
Have tp agree that exposed welding does seem to be fashionable thing, but its not a neat job, my tutor on my apprenticeship would have not been impressed, its not done evenly or neatly.