Adding Brakes

Front end looks weak.

I have been looking at my bike and worrying how lightweight and puny the front end appeared. From some angles it looked OK but in profile the front wheel looked seriously under nourished. My hope was that adding discs and calipers would improve the appearance greatly but, although I had a set of MK1 Bandit calipers, hoses and master cylinder assembly I had been unable to find a good pair of discs at a price I could afford.
Finally, a pair of lightly used Bandit discs came up for auction and I managed to buy them at a very reasonable price. They duly arrived at my place of work yesterday, Friday, so I hid myself in the garage this afternoon and set about adding some beef to my bike's pointy end.

Just adding the discs vastly improved the look of the wheel.

As this is only the mock up stage I didn't bother adding locktite to each of the bolts, I just wanted to make sure the components would all marry together and that their addition would cure my wimpy looking front end.
With the discs in place I re-fitted the front wheel and set about mounting the twin pot calipers. I still need to buy the correct caliper mounting bolts so am making do with some stainless Allen bolts at present. Both calipers mounted easily followed by the associated pipework. I used some stainless Allen screws to secure the hoses to the lower fork legs and the splitter to the underside of the lower yoke. Not forgetting to use copper grease on every one to save myself the grief of seized fasteners further down the line. Once everything was installed I sat myself down on an upturned crate and enjoyed a mug of coffee. My little XS650 was looking much more muscular and I was happy.



Discs and calipers installed

Unfortunately, the weather outside is awful, heavy rain and high winds mean I am unable to wheel the bike outside to take pictures so I have had to make do with shooting in the confines of my tiny garage but I hope these pictures show just how much installing the brakes has improved the visual impact of the bike.
In the final build I intend to change the current tyre for one with more sidewall height to match the BT45 on the rear. I think the current rubber looks much too sports orientated to be on my little bobber.
But for now I am much happier with how the Yam looks and can now focus on getting the GS500 rear caliper to work with the XS swingarm.



The bike is looking much more balanced front to back now.