Another day in the life of a motorcycle builder

It was one of those fun days at the shop, I got to the shop a little before opening (my normal time). I already knew what my project list was for the day - make the spacers for Tony's handlebars. Little background on Tony's bike, I reworked his factory fat-bob set, adding a filler panel down the center and fitting a custom mini speedo, relocated the key switch and coils to a custom made mount on the left side of the engine where the horn is normally, made a curved backpack carrier for the rear fender, and a few other odds and ends. Well, in relocating the key switch, I changed it to a universal type setup, it basicly works like the one in your car now. Since his bike didn't have turn-signals to begin with, this left only the hi/lo beam switch on the bars. So, we decided to relocate it and toss the control housings all together, this ment making a set of billet alum. spacers to fill the gaps left to make it all look good. Normally on a bike with 1" diameter bars I make a spacer that tapers straight from the hand control left to the bar. On this bike it has a set of fat Carlini T-Bars, so this means they have a taper on the ends where the bar drops down to 1" in diameter, Tony happened to show up at the shop just as I finished cutting and boring the slugs for the filler pieces and I described how I usually make the spacers, after looking at the bars for a bit, we decided that instead of the usual straight taper, I'd cut the slugs to match the diameter of the brake and clutch housing and do a slight round-off taper on the ends. So far, I've got about two hours in cutting and boring the basic slug, add another two hours to cut the clutch side slug down to size on the lathe and taper the end, throw in a half hour for lunch and you can see how my day has gone so far. After getting that one ruffed out, the boss and me stood back and took a look at how things looked, we both said it looked like crap. A little over four hours work down the drain, I ended up making the filler pieces out of 1-1/8" OD tubing that took me about ten minutes to make and look a hell of a lot better. Oh well, that's life in a custom bike shop. Well, at least one good thing came out of it all, I've got two slugs already bored for the next job and I'm now two days ahead of schedule since I don't have to make alum. spacers. Gotta luv it, ROFLMAO !