I got a couple hours in on the project bike this weekend and managed to get the GSXR front end mounted up. It went on surprisingly easy and didn't need as much machining as I thought it would.
The XT500 stock has individual ball bearings in the steering stem. I bought a conversion kit for taper roller bearings that comes with the 2 bearings and 2 races to press into the frame. Luckily the steer tube bearing diameters on the GSXR triple clamps are the same as the XT500 so no special machining needed there.
Here is the bottom bearing and dust seal set into the head tube. You can see the head tube extends down past the bottom of the dust seal.
The bottom bearing on the XT steer tub sits into the tube pretty far. The XT triple clamp shoulders down to clear the bottom face of the steer tube. The GSXR bottom triple clamp was flat to the bearing surface so I had to make a 1/4" spacer to raise the bottom bearing. Luckily the bearing surface on the steering stem was long enough to still support the bearing with the spacer. For the spacer I ended up using a piece of 1/4" aluminum plate since I didn't have any large aluminum round stock kicking around. I used a 1-3/4" hole saw to cut out a 'washer'. Then I stuck it in my lathe and opened up the center bore to just over 30mm to slide over the steer stem. Threw the triple clamp in the freezer overnight and then pressed on the bearing.
I also started pulling off some of the other stock parts: seat, rear fender, speedometer, headlight and exhaust. Then I mounted up the street tracker seat, exhaust header and front wheel to get an idea how its going to look. Pretty happy so far with the look.
Inner tubes wrapped around the fork tubes since the steering stops don't line up
How it started a couple days ago...
