Kawasaki KZ650 cafe-racer. Wheels. Part 2.

The idea of converting Honda CBX550 Comstar wheels into spoked wheel is not new; many people did this conversion before me. The simplest way is to make drawings and order laser or water cut adapters from steel or stainless steel. But as I wrote earlier, I have machine metal workshop near me and guys there have CNC machine tools. So I preferred to order CNC machined aluminum adapters. But before ordering I had to make drawings, and to make measuring for drawings I had to disassemble wheels.

Comstar wheels consist of hub, rim and banana-like spacer that are mounted by rivets to rim and by 7mm bolt and nuts with triangle heads to hub. Firstly I removed triangle nuts with help of 11mm 12-point socket (I pressed it on nut) and impact wrench.

Some drilling and countersink bit solved question of rivets. After such treatment they could be easy knocked out.

Once I got bare hubs I made all measuring and then drew first version of blueprints. I chose 6mm 2024 aluminum alloy for spoke adapters and this aluminum as well as CNC machining isn’t cheap thing. So to check if I made no mistakes in my drawings and to improve them I ordered to cut parts from 3mm expanded PVC sheet on cutting plotter. I ordered four parts to imitated two 6mm adapters.

I chose 36 spoke rims, but as you may see, every adapter has 36 holes. That’s not mistake, I made this on purpose, as by the way I had to solve question of spokes positioning.

That’s how hub looks with installed PVC adapters:

Let’s add to this brake boards:

And rim:

Ones I learned all I wished from PVC models of adapters I made corrections to the drawings and ordered adapters to be machined from aluminum. Spoke adapters for front wheels I made identical:

And mostly similar to them is right side adapter for rear wheel, but left side adapter for rear wheel I designed to be different. This spoke adapter is to be installed from sprocket side of wheel so it needs no openings and cutting similar to other adapters for its installation. And unlike the other adapters it is completely visible when installed, so I improved its view.