Boano Africa Twin Tank

This arrived in the post yesterday. It's a 42 litre fuel tank for a RD04 Africa Twin. I bought it from Rugged Roads and it was shipped directly from Boano in Italy. Rugged Roads are very pleasant and easy to deal with and the whole process only took a couple of weeks.

Boano was one of the Marathon Africa Twin pilots back in the Paris Dakar in the late eighties/nineties and has been manufacturing Marathon parts based on the original bikes for some time.

The standard tank holds about 23 litres and weighs about 9kg dry. The Boano tank surprisingly, weighs in at 8kg.

The profiles of the two tanks are similar, but the Boano tank seems to have additional volume to the rear of the filler cap.

There's a very noticeable difference in plan.

It's big! Scary big!

#Boano #RuggedRoads #RD04 #MarathonAfricaTwin #AfricaTwin #BigTank #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

Africa Twin Front End

Tonight I reassembled the Africa Twin front end. All the aluminium castings have been powdercoated sparkly gloss black. All the threads have been re-tapped and all the fasteners have been replaced with stainless steel items.

I also preloaded the fork springs by 10mm by the simple expedient of fitting 6 no. M12 washers to each leg - they couldn't have fitted any better had they been made by NASA! The amount of preload is a guess and it can be adjusted by adding or removing washers, but I expect I'll need some preload to compensate for the extra weight of the 42 litre fuel tank.

When I got the bike back from Italy it was badly corroded after being driven through Italy in the snow and put away for five years covered in road salt! Some of the fasteners seized and broke off in the fork sliders and had to be drilled out.

Since then, I've declared war on corrosion, hence the powdercoating rather than bare aluminium, and all the fasteners have been fitted with copious amounts of copper anti-seize paste.

This project is a slow burn, but it is progressing. Watch this space...

#AfricaTwin #RD04 #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

Powder Coat

I've been pretty busy with work for the last couple of months and I haven't been able to get much workshop time. What little workshop time I've had has been spent working on stuff for other people so my various projects have been neglected.

On Friday I picked up some stuff for the Buell and the Africa Twin projects from Tallaght Powder Coating and so I got to spend some time on them over the long weekend. The Africa Twin is very much a long term thing, but the Buell should be back on the road in a couple of weeks.

#PowderCoating #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

Africa Twin Modified Foot Controls

I got some bits powder coated for the Africa Twin. The AT is very much in the background at the moment and will be for the foreseeable future. But I've done some modifications to the foot controls, got them powder coated and made some stainless hardware.

The side stand has a much bigger foot now so it will stand up on loose sand or mud or whatever and the foot pegs have been widened to make it more comfortable to stand on them for long periods - both of these are useful desert modifications.

The cables in the picture are for fixing the foot controls to the engine to prevent them from peeling back if the bike gets crashed.

#AfricaTwin #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage