Next thing was to bore out the worn ends of the spring plunger bearings, in order to braze bushes in. Unfortunately I forgot to picture this, but you can see the bored-out end on the adjacent pic.

Then, as the stem is very thin-walled on the Harley item, and it was quite bent as well, I cut it off and bored out the rest.

Please do not try to remove such an item red hot, you will be left with pretty badly bent and scaled bridge plates which will give a lot of trouble when trying to braze a new stem in. (speaking from experience; I once removed a single plate to replace it.)

Oh yes, and I did grind away the steering lock stops that are there on a Harley fork, but not on a Castle. Mind you, I am not trying to fake anything (otherwise I would not tell you this), but I want the result to look as close as possible to the original thing!

Not that they will add a horrible lot of strength, but I feel these are the small things that make for "Superiority"

(50mm outer, 29mm inner dia., about 5mm thick)

Fabricating them from solid by boring and then cutting them off with a parting tool is no good fun, but sawing them out from a steel plate and then turning either diameter is even worse I think!

Now everything should be ready for brazing I hope.

So I made them up from a piece of 4mm sheet metal and a turned bit, welded together.

Cleaning up the weld took some patience, of course.

If you need to make up a pair of these, click on the pic and you will find a little sketch with dimensions.

With everything cleaned up a little, it looks quite promising.

And I have turned a little "top hat" bush which will carry the bearing. You could argue that I might have finished the lower stem end to the correct diameter for the bearing, but I do not think this is advisable. Firstly I do not want to seat the bearing ring on the top cross plate (which is never quite true to the stem) and apart from that I can turn the intermediate bush to be a good fit on the stem after this has been cleaned up.