MR BRIDGE'S MOTORCYCLE DIARIES Making your own’s a worthwhile project if you’re new to metal-work as it’ll increase your skill-set, and give you some practice at metal-work at the same time. If you’ve been at it for a while, and don’t need the practice,

scrap bins, and getting prices locally.

The next thing you need is some threaded bar. As a rule of thumb, the threaded bar wants to have a diameter that’s under half the width of the material you’re using for the nuts. Since I was using 25mm steel, then that meant 12mm threaded bar would work, and it cleared the narrow the groove around the table but, if your table’ll allow for making them longer than they are wide, then that’s worth doing. Cutting the 25mmx10mm steel into 25mm lengths is relatively easy with a hacksaw, as long as you chose the right blade (Fig.5). If you’ve tried to save money by buying a pack of 10 hacksaw blades from China for

than just that, but it’s a good start.

I’ve got an Evolution Rage cut-off saw (Fig.6), which’d be an even better start though, and you buy these new for around £100 (they never seem to come up second-hand so I imagine most people who buy them are happy with them too). Before cutting the nuts out, I took a pair of calipers, and that’s 25mm wide (some are 1”) so I used that to scribe the cut line 25mm from the end, and cut off the first nut (Fig.9). I did the first one with the hacksaw, and offered it up to the rest of the length of steel as a check on how square I’d cut it, and the size I’d cut it to (Fig.10). That looked good and, having satisfied myself it wasn’t coloured one face in with a marker pen, and scribed the lines in that (Fig.12). This isn’t a job that requires pin-point accuracy but, if you’re new to this, it’s good practice, so being a little critical of your efforts’ll stand you in good stead, It’s worth remembering that each nut has two sides so you can always turn it over and lay out

you can switch the drill off with your left hand. I have seen people stand beside the drill, and hold the grips in their right hand while they operate the drill with their left, because their ‘right hand is stronger’, which is weird, uncomfortable, and a bit dangerous.

After the pilot hole, the nuts need drilling to the tapping size. I have a external ones, so if you’re buying your first thread cutting tools, it’s worth thinking about buying some decent quality taps rather than a 45-piece set of ‘taps and dies’ that’re only any good for cleaning up existing threads.

Once the nuts were drilled to the tapping size, I used a bigger drill to de-burr the hole, and put a small the threaded rod can no longer wind its way out of the bottom of the nut and jack up, or break the surface of the table.

With the nuts made, and the threaded bar to hand, I cut a couple of pieces of the 25mmx10mm steel to make some hold-downs from – basically 125mm long pieces with a couple of