I was about to bend stock into brackets to hold the seat, when a light bulb went on. I would basically be recreating single-hole conduit clamps, so why not just buy some of those?
Meanwhile in other news, I started work on my revised steering clamps. I'd previously bought a GS500 triple clamp for one of my other projects [
The Aermacchi-Ducati Special]. With just a tiny bit of mathing, I discovered that the GS steering stem is the proper length to fit the Bultaco frame without the kludgy spacer I'm currently using, and without turning down the steering stem. Unfortunately, the GS500 has larger fork tubes and the wrong clamp offset, so the triple clamps are not suitable. Therefore, I bought two additional steering stem/lower clamp assemblies: one GS500, one from a GS650L (what Bultakenstein uses). I ground away the welds on the bottom of the stem on each and pressed them out.
As i suspected, they have identical diameters at the bottom. After a quick swippity-swappo, a quick trip to my friendly neighborhood welder is all that's needed to have a GS650L lower steering clamp wedded to the shorter GS500 stem.
Perfect! Oh, no...wait. The GS650L
top clamp doesn't bolt to the other end GS500 stem. I ended up cutting apart a spare adjustment nut to make a threaded collar, and then turned a stepped alloy spacer to make a cap nut.
The whole stack goes together like this, and another sticky issue resolved.
Bultakenstein's existing steering stem won't go to waste. It will get used on
yet another project I've come up with, mostly to
use up a lot of Bultakenstein's rejected parts.