A super simple project this week. For all the fancy projects You see here, there are ever so many simple boring cutting ~100 simple flat plates for a neighbor to weld that nobody really wants to see.
An friend of mine in Eastern WA had taken a ‘junker’ bike with a scrapped motor and saved it from salvage. He threw an aftermarket motor and transmission gear-box in it and just couldn’t get things to line up. He expanded the mounting slots over to the edge where if he had gone any further he would have been into the weld and the frame.
It ran fine for puttingering around for ~10mins but inevitably if he went out for an hour long ride on the unimproved country roads around town he’d end up throwing a chain.
This project was negotiated completely by text message. He described exactly what he wanted via text. I drew it up (in of all things) MS-Paint because I was on a laptop in a hotel (late evening) traveling for work.
Basically he wanted a pair of steel rings to go on either side of the sprocket to help keep the chain where it belongs.
This is the ofending sprocket.
With the CAD model above agreed to via text, I returned home from my trip late in the week and went to work knocking these out. It totally amazes me how fast this kind of project goes…
The material here is 1/8in mild steel plate.
Oh this just never gets old 
I was in a hurry after my trip and didn’t refil the water table fully. There weren’t any problems from this, but I usually try to get the level up much closer to the bottom of the material.
And wow, the plasma cutter never Disappoints…
There are of course a pair of these…
Close up showing some of the detail. The arrangement with my friend is that I would cut them, he would clean them up and paint/powder coat/whatever, so this project went blazingly fast.
When UPS dropped these on his door-step, he didn’t waste any time. Right onto the bike and out for a test ride. (there are spacer washers, etc and these are not final final fasteners used.)
My friend is in his 60’s, has been a life long professional machinist and motorcycle enthusiast as long as I’ve known him (~35yrs). All this is said to drive home the don’t try this at home part of this, as inherently there is risk of many things going teribly wrong with this kind of DIY on a motor vehicle.
Yes, a super fast / super simple project to share this week.
Curious how long this really took? Here is a realtime video I shot on my phone of the 2’nd one being cut. Actual Speed Cutting Video 
Acording to the google player the cutting was done in the neighborhood of 1min20-Seconds.
-Kenneth