Hiway Bar Shifter

  Ya know how sometimes ya get comfortable on the bike and just don't want to change positions yet? I get this a lot when I'm eased back on the Rat Turd with my feet up on the hiway pegs. The bike has a small engine and sometimes I need to grab a gear or two to properly blow off some cager in my way. This has meant lifting my foot off the peg, finding the shifter down on the side of the bike and making the gear change down and then later back up. Oh the horror having to deal with this! I need a rat with the proper propulsion system.
OR...
 I can just make a shifter up on the hiway peg. To do this I needed to dig into my stash of lawn mower parts that just seemed too good to throw out. I had a forward/reverse pedal from a Yazoo mower that seemed like it would make a good heel/toe shifter.

 First I needed to make a bracket the shifter could rock on. This was a simple matter of welding a bolt to a piece of steel that I drilled a few holes through.

 Here is the Yazoo shifter in place. The way I have it mounted under the foot rest means I will have to make an intentional effort to change gears. I don't foresee any accidental shifts.

 I needed to get the shift linkage to change direction so that pushing down with my toe will result in down shifting. To do this I found an old rear chain sprocket from my Aprilia. Making this piece part of the linkage is very cheezy so naturally I went ahead and made it work.

 Down on the shift lever I just bent a rod and welded it to the foot shifter. The long shiny shift rod is a piece of steering linkage from a Husqvarna lawn mower. I have a few left if you need one.

 I just need to throw this in here so my wife can better understand some of the uses of the 10 ton porta-power she bought me for my b-day. If you look two pictures up you can see a steel bracket I made. It's above the rusty round transmission end cap. I had overbent the piece trying to get it lined up just right. In the above pic you can see me using the hydraulic spreader to bend it back into shape. Thanks again to my wife and kids for the tools!

 So there it is. In your face low budget rat shit. I'm not sure what's next. I still want to make a fuel tank but I don't have the material yet. What I mean is I haven't found any junk laying around that will work. I do have to relocate one of the air horns now that my new shift linkage is in the way. Maybe I'll work on that next.

End.