After a couple of years of humming and hawing about what to do with the LC, I decided to rebuild her.
The initial problem was the frame damage.
After poking around the rusted area with a screwdriver, it was clear that there was no suitable way to repair the damage at home with a mig welder.
There was simply not enough good metal left to which to weld.
In places, the screwdriver penetrated through both sides of the tube, leaving a pile of rust flakes on the garage floor.
The headstock itself, with the frame number was reasonably sound, and to avoid re-registering, and to keep the same registration plate, I wanted to keep it.
Expert advice was required.
There were some false dawns with local auto repair shops, but eventually, following a number of recommendations, I settled on Maidstone motoline.
A phone call, and the emailing of a number of images resulted in a quote for the work, which was acceptable… being less than the current price of an LC frame with logbook.
The issue was that the complex curves of the headstock would be best reparied by welding in a good section of steel from a donor LC frame… which I didn’t have.
Fabricating a piece from scratch would be too time consuming and complex to make the repair viable.
We agreed that I would deliver the frame, and await a suitable donor frame to turn up at the repair shop.
I also wanted the lug for the sidestand relocated.
The one on the frame was most definitely not original, and mounted in completely the wrong place, which led the bike to be very unstable when perched on its side.
Given the future existence of a donor frame, they would also attempt to translocate the sidestand lug.
With all this agreed, I prepared the bike to be delivered to Maidstone Motoline, and booked the day off work.
The frame was stripped of everything except the swingarm.
The swing arm itself, I removed and replaced using new bushes, so that wheel alignment could be done as accurately as possible, when the headstock was removed and replaced.
The frame was delivered to Maidstone Motoline on Thursday April 17th 2014
I went to retrieve it nearly a year later, on Tuesday March 10th 2015.
